As authors of current and forthcoming biographies, our panel will discuss the following questions: How can we pitch Asian or Asian American themed content for broad audiences? What surprises and challenges come from researching across language, borders, and specific art forms? How do we gain the trust of our subjects’ families, and how does the past reveal itself to the digital age? (ISSUES TRACK)

Moderator

Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China and Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong. She is also the co-editor of Hong Kong Noir and a regular contributor to the Asian Review of Books, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and World Literature Today. Her work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Pop Matters, and the South China Morning Post. Blumberg-Kason lives in the Chicago suburbs.

Panelists

Karen Fang is a film scholar and cultural critic who writes and speaks for museums and film festivals around the world. Her newest book, Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong, is a biography of the Chinese American immigrant artist who helped make the Disney animated classic Bambi. A specialist on the intersection of Eastern and Western aesthetics, Fang has also written about the cross-cultural influences between Hong Kong and Hollywood cinema and the impact of exotic artifacts on 19th-century British writing. Her writing on Tyrus Wong has also appeared in Smithsonian magazine, Hyperallergic, and on the popular public radio series The Engines of Our Ingenuity.

Katie Gee Salisbury is the author of Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong (Dutton, 2024), a new biography of the first Asian American movie star. Salisbury’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Believer, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship in 2021 and gave the TED Talk “As American as Chop Suey.” Gee Salisbury also writes the newsletter “Half-Caste Woman.” A fifth-generation Chinese American who hails from Southern California, she now lives in Brooklyn.

Sung-Yoon Lee, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, is the author of The Sister: The Extraordinary Story of Kim Yo Jong, the Most Powerful Woman in North Korea, published in America by Public Affairs in September 2023. Previously, Dr. Lee, born and raised in South Korea, taught Korean history at the Fletcher School, Tufts University.