Acclaimed author and National Book Award finalist Min Jin Lee will read from and discuss her highly anticipated new novel, American Hagwon, with Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Under the Falls.
General admission tickets are $10. A $45 ticket includes a copy of American Hagwon. Tickets can be purchased below.
Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times "100 Best Books of the Century.” Lee's third novel American Hagwon will be published on September 29, 2026.
As New York State Author Laureate (2025-2027), Lee received the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit. She is the 2024 recipient of The Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence. Lee has received the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, and the Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity from South Korea. Her fiction has been translated into over 35 languages. She is the recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Lee is an inductee of the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.
Lee served as the Editor of Best American Short Stories 2023. Her essays and criticism have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, Travel & Leisure, Conde Nast Traveler, Vogue, and The Times of London. She is a Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College. She is at work on the novel, Marshall Plan, the fourth of the Diaspora Quartet, and writing Name Recognition, a memoir. Lee lives in Harlem with her family.
The event will take place in the First Parish Church, 425 Congress Street, Portland, ME 04101. Print: A Bookstore will sell books.
Richard Russo
Richard Russo is the author of ten previous novels, most recently Somebody's Fool, Chances Are..., Everybody’s Fool, and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of stories; the memoir Elsewhere; and the essay collection Life and Art. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which, like Nobody’s Fool, won multiple awards for its screen adaptation, and in 2023 his novel Straight Man was adapted into the television series Lucky Hank. In 2017 he received France’s Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. His most recent novel is Under the Falls. He lives in Falmouth, Maine.