Cupcake October 12, 2004

Cupcake, the reading series for New York's best women writers, features Joanne Jacobson ("Hunger Artist") and Monique Truong ("The Book of Salt"). FREE.

Joanne Jacobson's recently completed memoir, Hunger Artist, evokes the unraveling of one Jewish family's hopes of starting fresh on post-World War II suburban ground. Her essays have appeared in such publications as The New England Review, The Nation, BOMB, The Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, American Literary Review, and The Iowa Review. She teaches American literature, American studies, and creative writing at Yeshiva University.

Monique Truong was born in Saigon in 1968 and moved to the United States at age six. She graduated from Yale University and the Columbia University School of Law, going on to specialize in intellectual property. Truong coedited the anthology Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose. Her first novel, The Book of Salt, a national bestseller, has been awarded the 2003 Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and the Young Lions Fiction Award, among other honors. Granting Truong an Award of Excellence, the Vietnamese American Studies Center at San Francisco State University called her "a pioneer in the field, as an academic, an advocate, and an artist." Truong now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

More: http://www.cupcakeseries.com.