The People’s Tongue with Chang-rae Lee

Monday, December 11, 2023 | 6:30 p.m.

Immigrants have a special relationship with the English language based on necessity. Join authors Chang-rae Lee and Ilan Stavans in a conversation about finding one’s voice in a ‘foreign’ tongue. Chang-rae Lee’s essay Mute in an English-Only World is included in The People’s Tongue, an anthology exploring about American English edited by Ilan Stavans.

Chang-rae Lee is the author of six novels: Native Speaker (1995), A Gesture Life (1999), Aloft (2004), The Surrendered (2010), which was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, On Such a Full Sea (2014) which was a Finalist for the NBCC and won the Heartland Fiction Prize, and his most recent novel, My Year Abroad (2021).

Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, the publisher of Restless Books, and a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. His latest book is The People’s Tongue: Americans and the English Language.