Writers and Wine: 16th Annual MFA Scholarship Fund Benefit

A tasting of wines paired with writers, Karen Joy Fowler, Chang-Rae Lee, Forrest Gander and more TBA. Emceed by Lysley Tenorio, MFA Director and Tara McDonald, Wine Director, Prospect SF.

Evening Timeline:

5:30pm: Champagne reception with music by Alex Kelly

6:00pm: Wine tasting and readings

6:30pm: Raffle tickets available to purchase and break

6:45pm: Wine tasting and readings

7:15pm: Raffle

7:30pm: Evening concludes

Chang-rae Lee is the author of five novels: Native Speaker (1995); A Gesture Life (1999); Aloft (2004); The Surrendered, which was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and On Such a Full Sea (2014) which was a Finalist for the NBCC and won the Heartland Fiction Prize. His novels have won numerous awards and citations, including the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the American Book Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, ALA Notable Book of the Year Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Literary Award, the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, and the NAIBA Book Award for Fiction. He has also written stories and articles for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time (Asia), Granta, Conde Nast Traveler, Food & Wine, and many other publications.

Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six novels and three short story collections including We are all completely beside ourselves. The Jane Austen Book Club spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s previous novel, Sister Noon, was a finalist for the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Her debut novel, Sarah Canary, was a New York Times Notable Book, as was her second novel, The Sweetheart Season. In addition, Sarah Canary won the Commonwealth medal for best first novel by a Californian, and was listed for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize as well as the Bay Area Book Reviewers Prize. Fowler lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Forrest Gander, a writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, was born in the Mojave Desert and lives in Petaluma, CA. Gander’s book Core Samples from the World, a meditation on the ways we are revised and translated in encounters with the foreign, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among his recent titles are the novel The Trace, and two translations: Then Come Back: the Lost Neruda Poems and Alice, Iris, Red Horse: Selected Poems of Gozo Yoshimasu. Be With, his first book of poems since 2011, is forthcoming in 2018 from New Directions.

Lysley Tenorio’s stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, Manoa, and The Best New American Voices and Pushcart Prize anthologies. A Whiting Writer’s Award winner and a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he has received fellowships from the University of Wisconsin, Phillips Exeter Academy, Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Born in the Philippines, Lysley currently lives in San Francisco, and is an associate professor at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Wines from Caymus Vineyards, Ordinaire Wine Shop. Beer from Lagunitas Brewery.