Prairie Lights

Cleo Qian will read from her short story collection,  LET’S GO LET’S GO LET’S GO, longlisted for The Story Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction.  These 11 short stories explore the alienated and technology-mediated lives of young Asian and Asian-American women today. “Cleo Qian’s LET’S GO LET’S GO LET’S GO is an uncanny Asian American fantasia where fringe artist collectives, melancholy K-pop stars, anxious piano prodigies, disembodied digital ghosts, and lovelorn alchemists converge. Deeply psychological, these stories confront the bizarre horrors of modern life, finding surprising beauty and supernatural catharsis. I’ll be thinking about these characters for a long, long time.” –Jean Chen Ho

Cleo Qian is a fiction writer and poet from California. She received her MFA from NYU. Her work has appeared in over 20 outlets; was a winner of the Zoetrope: All Story Short Fiction Competition; has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, twice longlisted for the DISQUIET Prize, and supported by Sundress Academy for the Arts. By day, she works at a nonprofit. She currently splits her time between Chicago and New York. She will be joined in conversation by Writers’ Workshop MFA in Poetry student Yun Qin Wang.