With

Thanhhà Lại
Sayantani DasGupta
Marie Myung-Ok Lee

Moderated by Professor Sarah Park Dahlen, St. Catherine University

* * * 
Thanhhà Lại is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Inside Out & Back Again, her debut novel in verse, which won both a National Book Award and a Newbery Honor, and Listen, Slowly, which was named to numerous best book of the year lists. Her most recent novel, Butterfly Yellow, a YA debut, received a Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction. She lives near New York City. Photo credit: Paula Landry

Marie Myung-Ok Lee teaches creative writing at Columbia and is the Writer in Residence at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Her young adult novel, Finding My Voice, widely thought to be the first contemporary set Asian American novel, has recently been re-released. She is a cofounder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and her adult novel, The Evening Hero, is forthcoming in 2022 with Simon & Schuster.

Sarah Park Dahlen is an Associate Professor in the MLIS Program at St. Catherine University. Her research is on Asian American youth literature and transracial Korean adoption. She facilitated the creation of the Diversity in Children’s Books infographics and administered Lee & Low’s 2015 Diversity Baseline Survey. She co-edits Research on Diversity in Youth Literature and co-edited Diversity in Youth Literature. sarahpark.com @readingspark

Sayantani DasGupta is the New York Times bestselling author of the critically acclaimed, Bengali folktale and string theory-inspired Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond books from Scholastic, the first of which—The Serpent’s Secret—was a Bank Street Best Book of the Year, a Booklist Best Middle Grade Novel of the 21st Century, and an EB White Read Aloud Honor Book. Sayantani is a pediatrician by training, but now teaches at Columbia University, in the Graduate Program in Narrative Medicine, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. Her academic work is at the interstices of narrative, race, justice and health, and she is the author or editor of several academic books and anthologies. In her life as a children's author, she has a biography of Virginia Apgar coming out in April 2021 from Philomel as part of Chelsea Clinton's She Persisted series, coming in May 2021.

Asian American Children's Literature and Social Justice