The Leavers

Meet the Interview Contributors for Issue 33: Part 2

Superstition Review

Our editors are hard at work building Issue 33 of Superstition Review, which will launch May 1. This issue features interviews with eight award-winning authors. Here we are featuring the four authors, whose interviews are being conducted by Phoebe Nguyen. The authors are: Christina Vo, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Lisa Ko, and Sally Wen Mao.

Christina Vo is a writer, who currently works in development for Stanford University. She previously worked for international organizations in Vietnam and Switzerland and also ran a floral design business in San Francisco. She is the author of one previous memoir, The Veil Between Two Worlds (She Writes Press). Vo resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Root Fractures (2024) and Ghost Of (2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her video work has been exhibited at the Miller ICA. Nguyen is a MacDowell and Kundiman fellow, and a member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). She’s received an NEA fellowship and awards from the 92Y “Discovery” Poetry and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery contests. She teaches in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Lisa Ko is the author of The Leavers, a novel which was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction and won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2016, The New York Times, BuzzFeed, O. Magazine, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the MacDowell Colony, among others. Born in Queens and raised in Jersey, she lives in Brooklyn.

Sally Wen Mao is currently an MFA candidate at Cornell University. The recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, she has poems in Cave Wall, Another Chicago Magazine, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Copper Nickel, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. Her work has won first place in the 2010 Rhino Poetry Journal Editor’s Prize.

Contributor Update: Lisa Ko

Superstition Review

Congratulations to past contributor Lisa Ko, who has a new novel coming out in March! The novel is titled Memory Piece and will be available for purchase March 19th, 2024. Visit Penguin Random House for preorder information.

In the early 1980s, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are three teenagers drawn together by their shared sense of alienation and desire for something different. “Allied in the weirdest parts of themselves,” they envision each other as artistic collaborators and embark on a future defined by freedom and creativity.

By the time they are adults, their dreams are murkier. As a performance artist, Giselle must navigate an elite social world she never conceived of. As a coder thrilled by the internet’s early egalitarian promise, Jackie must contend with its more sinister shift toward monetization and surveillance. And as a community activist, Ellen confronts the increasing gentrification and policing overwhelming her New York City neighborhood. Over time their friendship matures and changes, their definitions of success become complicated, and their sense of what matters evolves.

Moving from the predigital 1980s to the art and tech subcultures of the 1990s to a strikingly imagined portrait of the 2040s, Memory Piece is an innovative and audacious story of three lifelong friends as they strive to build satisfying lives in a world that turns out to be radically different from the one they were promised.

This novel has received outstanding reviews:

“A moving, strikingly evocative exploration of New York’s art, tech, and activism scenes across the decades.”

—Vogue, Best books of 2024

“Lisa Ko has brought us one of those rare, sumptuous tales of art and friendship that feels both universal and inimitable.”

—Elle, Best (and most anticipated) Fiction Books of 2024

“This novel serves as an archive of our past and a vision for what’s to come, hauntingly beautiful in a way that’s both nostalgic and dystopian. In essence Memory Piece is about the power of remembering, especially when it’s painful.”

—Booklist

Lisa Ko is the author of the nationally bestselling novel The Leavers, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Ko’s short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and her essays and nonfiction have been published in The New York Times and The Believer.

Superstition Review did an interview with Ko in issue 21, you can view that here. To learn more about Ko and her work visit her website here.