10 authors named L.A. Times Critics at Large, will contribute to Books section
Author Marlon James at Jumel Terrace Books in Harlem, the setting for a scene in his novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings.”
The Times has assembled a panel of distinguished and diverse writers who will regularly contribute to the Books section.
The 10 authors who make up the Los Angeles Times Cultural Critics At Large have published works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. They have won dozens of prizes. A majority have deep connections to Southern California, even though they hail from four different nations.
They will help expand the literary conversation, challenging ideas and broadening readers’ understanding of literature and culture within the contemporary moment. They will write essays, cultivate a conversation with readers and, occasionally, contribute book reviews.
Their work will begin appearing over the next couple of Sundays, in time for the annual Festival of Books.
Marlon James
James won the 2015 Man Booker Prize for his novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” a fictionalized account of the 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley. He received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for his prior novel, “The Book of Night Women,” a story of 19th century Jamaican slaves. Born in Jamaica in 1970, James now teaches at Macalester College and lives in Minneapolis.
Laila Lalami
Lalami’s 2014 novel “The Moor’s Account” won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was on the Man Booker Prize longlist. She is a columnist for “The Nation” and has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship and a Lannan Foundation Residency fellowship. Born in Morocco, Lalami has a PhD in linguistics from USC and teaches at UC Riverside.
Susan Straight
Susan Straight
Straight is a recipient of the L.A. Times Book Prize’s Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement. Born and raised in Riverside, Straight has made the region the subject of her fiction and nonfiction, and is a teacher in UC Riverside’s creative writing program. Her 2001 novel “Highwire Moon” was a finalist for the National Book Award; her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and Lannan Literary Prize.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Nguyen is the author of the 2015 novel “The Sympathizer,” winner of the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, among other honors. A writer and academic, Vietnamese-born Nguyen is also the author of the 2016 critical work, “Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War,” and 2002’s “Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America.” Nguyen is an associate professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at USC.
David Kipen
David Kipen
Kipen is the former literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Kipen opened the Boyle Heights bookstore and lending library Libros Schmibros in 2010. The former book editor/critic of the San Francisco Chronicle and contributor to multiple volumes of California cultural history, Kipen holds a degree in literature from Yale University. He teaches in the UCLA writing program.
Alexander Chee
Chee is author of the novel 2016 “The Queen of the Night,” which spent three weeks on the L.A. Times bestseller list, and the novel “Edinburgh.” Chee was a winner of the Whiting Award in 2003 and has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. He has taught writing at Wesleyan University, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Columbia University, and currently lives in New York City, where he curates the Dear Reader series at Ace Hotel New York.
John Scalzi
Scalzi, author of the bestselling “Old Man’s War” series, is the former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. His novel “Redshirts” won the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Novel. In addition to publishing more than a dozen books, Scalzi served as creative consultant on the television series “Stargate: Universe” and was writer for the video game Midnight Star. Raised in the eastern San Gabriel Valley, Scalzi now lives in Ohio.
Rigoberto Gonzalez
Gonzalez’s four collections of poetry include “Unpeopled Eden,” which won the Lambda Literary Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. He has penned 10 works of prose, including novels, memoir, and bilingual childrens books. He has been awarded Guggenheim and NEA fellowships. Born in Bakersfield and raised by farmworkers who migrated between Mexico and the U.S., he now lives in New York and is a professor of English at Rutgers-Newark.
Rebecca Carroll
Carroll is the author of five books, including “Saving the Race: Conversations on Du Bois from a Collective Memoir of Souls” and “Sugar in the Raw: Voices of Young Black Girls in America.” The former editor of the Huffington Post’s Black Voices and managing editor of Paper Magazine, she is now a producer at WNYC Radio, producing a series of in-depth projects about race in New York City.
Adriana Ramírez
Ramírez was the recipient, in 2105, of the first PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize for her manuscript “Dead Boys,” a nonfiction work-in-progress that examines how geopolitics manifests in the lives and deaths of young men from the three countries Ramírez calls her own: Mexico, Colombia, and the United States. Once an internationally ranked slam poet, Ramirez has an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Pittsburgh, where she now teaches in its English department.
For more staff and newsroom news, follow @LATreadersrep.
