Susan Choi and Ed Ochester

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Susan Choi and Ed Ochester will read as part of the Writers Reading Series. NOTE LATER START TIME.

Susan Choi is the author of four novels. Her first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel,  American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her most recent novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lammy Award.  A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she teaches fiction writing at Yale and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Ed Ochester's latest book of poetry is Sugar Run Road (Autumn House Press). His others include Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New (Autumn House Press, 2007), The Republic of Lies, a chapbook (Adastra Press, 2007), The Land of Cockaigne (Story Line, 2001), Snow White Horses: Selected Poems 1973–1988 (Autumn House, 2000), Cooking in Key West (Adastra Press, 2000), Changing the Name to Ochester (Carnegie Mellon, 1988), Miracle Mile (Carnegie Mellon, 1984), and Dancing on the Edges of Knives (University of Missouri Press, 1973).

He is the editor of the Pitt Poetry Series at the University of Pittsburgh Press and edited American Poetry Now (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007). He is also the general editor for the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for short fiction at the press. With Peter Oresick, he edited The Pittsburgh Book of Contemporary American Poetry and, with Judith Vollmer, he edits the poetry magazine, 5 AM. Ochester has received fellowships in poetry from the NEA and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He received the George Garrett Award from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and the Artist of the Year award from the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, a major cash award given annually to one established artist in Western Pennsylvania, selected from all fields.

His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2007 and 2013, and the Pushcart Prize anthologies. Educated at Cornell, Harvard, and the University of Wisconsin, Ochester has taught at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and was for 20 years the director of the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh. He was twice elected president of AWP. He lives, as he says, “in the sticks” outside Pittsburgh.