Author Susan Choi will be reading from her most recent work, “American Woman” at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 8, in Wiekamp Hall, Room 1001, Indiana University South Bend. The event will include a question and answer period and a reception in Wiekamp Hall, Room 3001.

“American Woman” is a historical novel based on the 1974 Patty Hearst kidnapping, told from the point of view of one of Hearst’s Asian-American captors. The book was chosen by the Los Angles Times as of the top ten best novels of 2003.

Choi won a Guggenheim Fellowship in the summer of 2004. The fellowships are awarded to men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.

Choi, who is originally from South Bend and the daughter of IU South Bend mathematics professor Chang Choi, moved to Texas as a child with her mother. Her father came from Korea to University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn. He met Susan's mother, daughter of a Russian Jewish immigrant couple, at the University of Michigan.

Susan graduated from Yale University with a bachelor’s of arts degree in literature in 1990. She spent two years in a succession of odd jobs before enrolling at Cornell University. She left nearly three years later with a master’s in fine arts degree and a five page fragment based on her father's oral accounts of his first years in the United States.

About a year after moving to New York to work as a fact checker at The New Yorker, she began the laborious process of expanding the fragment into “The Foreign Student.” It was published in 1998 to critical raves and it also was placed on the Los Angeles Times best novel list.

The event is sponsored by the English Department, the Women’s Studies Department, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Student Government Association, and the Office of Academic Affairs.

For further information contact Elaine Ruth, English Department, at (574) 520-4224.