Writers Lunch
Writing Your First Novel

Join the MI writing community for a stimulating panel with three novelists who will share what they wish they'd known when they wrote their first novel. Speakers include Nancy Tingley (Jenna Murphy mystery series), Ethal Rohan (The Weight of Him), and Chun Yu (Tales of the Yellow Family - a novel in progress). Bring your questions and your lunch! Moderated by Rick Homan.

Nancy Tingley, author of the Jenna Murphy Mystery Series, which features an Asian art curator (A Head in Cambodia, A Death in Bali, Swallow Press) is a specialist in Southeast Asian art. Her third book, A Grave in Vietnam, will be released in the fall. She has recently begun writing short fiction and has published in Panoply, Moon Park Review, New Flash Fiction Review, and 3Elements, with flash fiction forthcoming in River and South Review and Thimble. NorCal Sisters in Crime will include her short story If, If, If in the anthology, Fault Lines, which will be released this spring.  She has published nonfiction books – including Arts of Ancient Vietnam: From River Plain to Open Sea – as well as contributing to scholarly books and journals. www.nancytingley.com

Chun Yu, Ph.D., poet, graphic novelist, and scientist is the author of the award-winning memoir in free verse Little Green: Growing Up During the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Simon & Schuster) and a historical graphic novel in progress on Mao and Li Yu (a tenth century Chinese emperor) as China's "Emperor Poets" (Roaring Brook Press/Macmillan). She contributed to the award-winning anthology Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace and Open Doors etc.. She has also been published on Boston Herald and MIT Tech Talk etc.. Her new poetry collection in English and Chinese has won a San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant which merges science, art, and spirituality based on her experiences as an immigrant from an old culture in revolution to a new world with transforming science and technologies.  She has also won a Zellerbach grant for her project "Two Languages, One Community" with Oakland Asian Cultural Center and poet Michael Warr, connecting Chinese and African American communities with poetry and story writing. "Chun Yu's poetry creates sense and order that readers young and old, eastern and western, will appreciate," writes Maxine Hong Kingston.

Ethel Rohan is an award-winning essayist, story writer, and novelist. Her debut novel The Weight of Him was an Amazon Best Book in Literary Fiction and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2017. It won a Plumeri Fellowship, the Silver Nautilus Award, the Northern California Publishers and Authors’ Award (NCPA), and was shortlisted for the Reading Women Award. Rohan is also the author of two story collections, Goodnight Nobody and Cut Through the Bone, the former longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and the latter longlisted for the Story Prize. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, World Literature Today, The Washington Post, PEN America, The Irish Times, and GUERNICA. Raised in Dublin, Ireland, she lives in San Francisco and is a member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto.