Charis welcomes Yoon Choi in conversation with Esi Edugyan for a celebration of Skinship: Stories. The breathtaking debut of an important new voice--centered on a constellation of Korean American families.

A long-married couple is forced to confront their friend's painful past when a church revival comes to a nearby town ... A woman in an arranged marriage struggles to connect with the son she hid from her husband for years ... A well-meaning sister unwittingly reunites an abuser with his victims.

Through an indelible array of lives, Yoon Choi explores where first and second generations either clash or find common ground, where meaning falls in the cracks between languages, where relationships bend under the weight of tenderness and disappointment, where displacement turns to heartbreak.

Skinship is suffused with a profound understanding of humanity and offers a searing look at who the people we love truly are.

Yoon Choi was born in Korea and moved to the U.S. at the age of three. She has an MA from Johns Hopkins and is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Her stories and essays have appeared in New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Narrative Magazine, and The Best American Short Stories 2018. She lives with her husband and four children in Anaheim, California.

Esi Edugyan is author of the novels The Second Life of Samuel Tyne and Half-Blood Blues, which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, among others. Washington Black, her third novel, won her a second Giller Prize and was also a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, as well as the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the International Dublin Literary Award. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

This event is free and open to all people, especially to those who have no income or low income right now, but we encourage and appreciate a solidarity donation in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Charis Circle's mission is to foster sustainable feminist communities, work for social justice, and encourage the expression of diverse and marginalized voices. https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/CharisCircle?code=chariscirclepage

We will be archiving this event and adding closed captioning as soon as possible after airing so that it will be accessible to deaf and HOH people. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don't hesitate to reach out to info@chariscircle.org. We are actively learning the best practices for this technology and we welcome your feedback as we begin this new way of connecting across distances.

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Skinship: Yoon Choi in conversation with Esi Edugyan