Singapore Lit Fest

2020 Singapore Literature Festival: Celebrity and Celebration with Amanda Lee Koe and Paula Mendoza

Friday 02 October 2020
9:30 - 10:30 p.m. New York Time

Calculate your local time »

Asia Society and Singapore Unbound present
A Reading and Discussion from the 4th Singapore Literature Festival in New York City

The word “celebrity” has its roots in the idea of celebration, which evokes not just an honored person but also a festive place. How does contemporary writing, in prose and verse, take up the terms of celebrity and celebration? Amanda Lee Koe (Delayed Rays of a Star) and Paula Mendoza (Play for Time) read from their scintillating literary debuts and discuss their personal forms of celebrating.

Moderated by Diane Josefowicz

Co-presented by Asia Society and Singapore Unbound 


About the Speakers: 

Amanda Lee Koe won the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize for her first story collection Ministry Of Moral Panic (Epigram Books). Her debut novel, Delayed Rays of A Star (Doubleday/Vintage Anchor), was one of NPR's Best Books of 2019 in the U.S., and a #1 Straits Times bestseller in Singapore.

Paula Mendoza earned her BA in English at the University of Texas and her MFA in Poetry at the University of Michigan. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Utah. She is the recipient of the Yalobusha Review Poetry Award, the Hopwood Award in Poetry, and the Michael R. Gutterman Award in Poetry. Hyphenated, she's Filipino-Canadian. Regionally, an Austinite. Mostly, her home's in words. She lives and writes in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Diane Josefowicz's writing has appeared recently in Conjunctions, Sou'Wester, The Saint Ann's Review, and Necessary Fiction. She is a regular contributor of book reviews to Singapore Unbound. With Jed Z. Buchwald, she is the author of The Riddle of the Rosetta, a new history of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics published in September 2020 by Princeton University Press. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.