RECKONINGS, RESISTANCE, AND RECLAMATIONS

11:30 am - 12:30 pm
| Location of Session: East Terrace
Adult Sessions

Start of Signing: 12:45 pm
| Signing Location: Festival Marketplace

My Schedule

About the Event

Set in coastal Singapore in the waning years of British rule, Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation captures the changing of a country through the story of one character, his family, and his community. On a struggling Texas plantation in the 1850s, six enslaved women slip from their sleeping quarters and gather in the woods under the cover of night to plan a covert rebellion in Tracey Rose Peyton’s Night Wherever We Go. Through their transcendent work, the authors offer stunning portraits of humanity.

About the Authors

Photo Credit: Juliana Tan

Rachel Heng

Born and raised in Singapore, Rachel Heng is the author of the novel Suicide Club, translated into 10 languages. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers and has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the National Arts Council of Singapore, among others. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University. The Great Reclamation is her latest novel.

Photo Credit: David Katzinger

Tracey Rose Peyton

Tracey Rose Peyton received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at University of Texas-Austin and her BA from Howard University. She’s an alum of VONA/Voices, Callaloo, The Writer’s Institute at CUNY, Sackett Street, and Tinhouse and has received fellowships from Hedgebrook and Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Her short fiction has appeared in Guernica, American Short Fiction, Prairie Schooner, Best American Short Stories 2021, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles, California. Night Wherever We Go is her debut novel.

Moderator

Josie Seeligson

Josie Seeligson earned a B.S. from Vanderbilt University and a Journalism M.A. from U.T. Austin. She has worked as a freelance prose writer, copy writer, and copy editor for publications including 300 Years of San Antonio, Analecta Literary Journal, perla arts magazine, The Rivard Report, Texas Monthly, San Antonio Current, and others. She has served on Gemini Ink’s staff and board and the San Antonio Book Festival Board of Directors.