Attica Locke and Celeste Ng in Conversation
UMN Conversations at Northrop
Tuesday, April 14, 7:30-9 p.m.
Free Event, Registration Required
Ticket limit: 6
The Esther Freier Lectures in Literature Series presents bestselling authors Celeste Ng, author of “Little Fires Everywhere,” and Attica Locke, author of the “Highway 59” trilogy and a screenwriter who adapted “Little Fires Everywhere” for Hulu. Professor V. V. Ganeshananthan will moderate this conversation, a special event celebrating 25 years of the Freier series.
The Esther Freier Lecture Series began in 2001 with author Jamaica Kincaid. The series was endowed by longtime University of Minnesota faculty member Esther Freier, a professor in medical technology. Freier, the first woman president of the Academy of Clinical and Laboratory Physicians and Scientists, had a deep love for literature and the humanities. Freier's endowment has allowed the Department of English to present two author events a year, always free and always bringing to campus writers "whose work has made a significant contribution to humanistic inquiry," fulfilling Freier’s wishes.
This in-person event is free and open to the public with registration. Live captioning and ASL provided. For further questions about accessibility services and the venue, please email sutt0063@umn.edu or call 612-626-1528. Presented by the Department of English.
Attica Locke is a New York Times bestselling author whose sixth novel “Guide Me Home,” the finale of her Edgar-Award winning “Highway 59” trilogy, joins “Bluebird, Bluebird” and “Heaven, My Home.” She is also the author of "Pleasantville,” winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and long-listed for the Bailey’s Prize for Women’s Fiction; “The Cutting Season,” winner of the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence; and her debut “Black Water Rising,” which was nominated for an Edgar Award, an NAACP Image Award, as well as a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was short-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. A former fellow at the Sundance Institute’s Feature Filmmaker’s Lab, Locke is also a screenwriter and TV producer, with credits that include “Empire,” “When They See Us” and the Emmy-nominated “Little Fires Everywhere,” for which she won an NAACP Image award for television writing. She co-created and executive produced an adaptation of her sister Tembi Locke’s memoir “From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home” for Netflix. She is currently in a multi-year development deal with Universal Television, working on the adaptation of her “Highway 59” series, among other shows.
Celeste Ng is the author of three novels: “Everything I Never Told You,” “Little Fires Everywhere” and “Our Missing Hearts.” Her first novel, “Everything I Never Told You,” was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014 and named a "best book of the year" by over a dozen publications. “Everything I Never Told You” was also the winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and the American Library Association’s Alex Award. It has been translated into over 30 languages and is being adapted for the screen. Her second novel, “Little Fires Everywhere,” was a #1 New York Times bestseller, a #1 Indie Next bestseller and Amazon's Best Fiction Book of 2017. It was named a "best book of the year" by over 25 publications and the winner of the Ohioana Award and the Goodreads Readers Choice Award 2017 in Fiction, and spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list. “Little Fires Everywhere” has been published abroad in more than 30 languages and has been adapted as a limited series on Hulu, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. Her third novel, “Our Missing Hearts” (2022) was an instant New York Times bestseller.
Ng grew up in Pittsburgh and Shaker Heights, Ohio. She attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan), where she won the Hopwood Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian and many other publications, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors.
The Department of English is unique in linking literary production (creative writing), critique (literary scholarship) and presentation/dissemination (publication and teaching). The department offers undergraduate majors and minors, an MA and a PhD in literature, as well as an undergraduate minor and a three-year MFA in creative writing. The Certificate in Editing & Publishing provides undergraduate students with the skills, knowledge and experience necessary to enter the field of publishing.
If you need assistance with your tickets, please call 612-624-2345, email umntix@umn.edu.
UMN Conversations at Northrop is a collection of lectures, panel discussions and other conversations focused on important and timely issues presented in collaboration among numerous University of Minnesota departments and held at Northrop.
