Rachel DeWoskin’s novel, Big Girl Small, (FSG 2011) is the recipient of the 2012 American Library Association’s Alex Award and was named one of the top 3 books of 2011 by Newsday. DeWoskin’s memoir, Foreign Babes in Beijing (WW Norton 2005) about the years she spent in China as the unlikely star of a Chinese soap opera, has been published in six countries and is being developed as a television series by HBO. Her debut novel, Repeat After Me (Overlook Press, 2009), won a Foreward Magazine Book of the Year award. Rachel has written essays and articles for Vanity Fair, The Sunday Times Magazine of London, Teachers and Writers, and Conde Nast Traveler, and has published poems in journals including Ploughshares, Seneca Review, New Delta Review, Nerve Magazine and The New Orleans Review. She teaches memoir and fiction at the University of Chicago, and divides her time between Chicago and Beijing with her husband, playwright Zayd Dohrn, and their two little girls. Her most recent novel, Blind, will be released in August 2014.
"If you are a critic of the Chinese government, it’s not easy to organize a physical gathering. Beijing cracks down hard on that kind of thing. But online, critics find they are not alone."
Author Rachel DeWoskin talks with her father-in-law, educator, writer, and activist Bill Ayers, about the private man behind the mythos and demonization of his public persona.
"I never thought of myself as an outsider...[Y]ou would have to give advantage to this space where you’re not, to think of it as sovereign because you’re not there."