Novelist Susan Choi to speak at annual benefit for People & Stories/ Gente y Cuentos on March 24

Susan Choi, the author of five novels, will be the speaker for the People & Stories/ Gente y Cuentos 2022 benefit event on Thursday, March 24, at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Princeton.

Her latest novel, “Trust Exercise,” earned the 2019 National Book Award for fiction. In 2021, her story “Flashlight” received the 2021 Times Audible Short Story Award. The recipient of the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award, and a Lambda Literary award, Choi has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. She teaches fiction writing at Yale University and lives in Brooklyn.

Proceeds from the annual fundraising event will help People & Stories continue its work opening doors to literature for new audiences. Programs, offered in English and Spanish, use oral readings and structured dialogues of short stories to invite participants to connect their own life experiences to the universal themes found in great literature. Participants include men and women who are incarcerated or engaged in re-entry, residents in halfway houses and homeless shelters, recent immigrants, and low-income seniors in residential settings. Many of the people the nonprofit serves are reading at or below a fifth-grade level, have not completed high school, or are economically disadvantaged.

Tickets for the event can be purchased online. The fee of $125 includes a pre-reading reception and silent auction viewing at 6 p.m., the program at 7 p.m., and dessert and coffee after the program. If you can’t join the program in person, the talk will also be live-streamed for ticket holders.