Chang-Rae Lee’s first two novels, Native Speaker and A Gesture Life, have between them won a host of literary honors, including the Hemingway/PEN Award for first fiction, QPB’s New Voices Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the Oregon Book Award, and the Asian-American Literary Award. Lee was recently selected by The New Yorker as one of the Twenty Best Writers Under Forty. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and numerous anthologies.

Each quarter, the Living Writers Reading Series brings visiting authors and poets to UC Santa Cruz to give students an in-depth look into the world of the working writer.  Sponsored by Oakes College and the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund.