Guest Author

Interview with Christine Hyung-Oak Lee and Giveaway for TELL ME EVERYTHING YOU DON’T REMEMBER

I am so pleased to welcome debut author Christine Hyung-Oak Lee to The Debutante Ball! Lee is the author of the memoir Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember, which was featured in The New York Times, Self Magazine, Time Magazine, and NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Zyzzyva, Guernica, The Rumpus, and BuzzFeed, among other publications. She is a…

Saturday, July 13, 2019
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Interview with Kristen Lepionka and The Last Place You Look Giveaway

Saturday, July 6, 2019
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This week I’m excited to welcome my other Unlikeable Female Characters podcast co-host Kristen Lepionka to the Ball! (We hosted Wendy Heard way back in December.) Kristen Lepionka is the author of the Roxane Weary mystery series. Her debut, The Last Place You Look, won the Shamus Award for Best First P.I. novel and was also nominated for Anthony and Macavity Awards. She grew up mostly in a public library and…

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Interview with Katherine Forbes Riley plus giveaway of THE BOBCAT

I’m so excited to welcome fellow debut author and fantastic human being Katherine Forbes Riley to the Ball this week! Aside from being an incredibly adept wizard with words, Katherine is also a computational linguist in Vermont. Katherine’s creative writing appears in the Wigleaf 2018 top 50 list, as well as numerous other literary journals, including Buffalo Almanack, from whom she received the Inkslinger’s Award for Creative Excellence. She received…

Saturday, June 29, 2019
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Interview with Loan Le, Author of A PHO LOVE STORY: “One book doesn’t define our writing style.”

This week, I am very excited to welcome Loan Le to the Debutante Ball! Loan is a good friend, a fantastic writer, and a superb editor, and her upcoming book A PHO LOVE STORY is out in 2020. A PHO LOVE STORY is Loan’s debut novel, a YA romantic comedy about two Vietnamese-American teens who fall in love and must navigate their newfound relationship even as it causes an uproar…

Saturday, June 22, 2019
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Interview with Lillian Li and Giveaway for NUMBER ONE CHINESE RESTAURANT

Saturday, June 1, 2019
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    I’m so excited to be hosting author Lillian Li this week! Lillian Li is the author of the novel Number One Chinese Restaurant, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and an NPR Best Book of 2018. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Granta, One Story, Bon Appetit, and Jezebel. Originally from the D.C. metro area, she lives…

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Interview with Roselle Lim and Giveaway for Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune

Saturday, May 25, 2019
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I could not be more thrilled to be hosting author Roselle Lim this week on the Ball! I’ve been waiting many months for her magical debut, Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune, to come out, and now it’s almost here! Roselle Lim was born in the Philippines and immigrated to Canada as a child. She lived in north Scarborough in a diverse, Asian neighbourhood. She found her love of…

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Interview with Rheea Mukherjee and The Body Myth Giveaway

Saturday, May 11, 2019
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Excited to welcome my 2017 Pitch Wars classmate (and recent podcast interviewee) Rheea Mukherjee to the Deb Ball this week! Rheea Mukherjee received her MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her fiction and non-fiction has been published in several publications including Scroll.in, Southern Humanities Review, Out of Print, QLRS and Bengal Lights, among others. Her previous stories have been Pushcart nominees, Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction…

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Interview with Dea Poirier and Next Girl to Die Giveaway

Saturday, May 4, 2019
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Please give a warm Debutante Ball welcome to this week’s guest, Dea Poirier! Dea Poirier was raised in Edmond, Oklahoma, where she found her passion during a creative writing course. She studied computer science and political science at the University of Central Oklahoma. She later spent time living on both coasts and traveling the United States before finally putting down roots in central Florida. She now resides somewhere between Disney…

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Interview with Danya Kukafka + giveaway of bestselling novel GIRL IN SNOW!

Saturday, April 27, 2019
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This week, I am so excited to welcome Danya Kukafka, whose debut novel GIRL IN SNOW (Simon & Schuster, 2017) was not only a national bestseller, but a book I was blessed to read when it was still in the editing stage! Danya and I once worked together at a time when I knew nothing about what it was like to actually publish a book. As I watched Danya work…

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Interview with Kirstin Chen and Giveaway for BURY WHAT WE CANNOT TAKE

Saturday, April 20, 2019
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  I could not be more thrilled to welcome this week’s guest, Kirstin Chen, to the debutante ball! Kirstin Chen’s second novel, Bury What We Cannot Take, was named a best book of the year by Entropy, Popsugar, and Book Bub, and a top pick of the season by Electric Literature, The Millions, The Rumpus, Harper’s Bazaar, and InStyle. She is also the author of Soy Sauce for Beginners. She has received awards from the Steinbeck Fellows Program, Sewanee, Hedgebrook, the…

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