Transplants: Daniel Tam-Claiborne in conversation with Joyce Chen

Please join us for a celebration of local author and former Hugo House Program Director Daniel Tam-Claiborne as he launches his debut novel, Transplants! He will be joined in conversation by former Hugo House Writer in Residence and The Seventh Wave Executive Director, Joyce Chen. Audience Q&A and signing will follow the reading and conversation.

A harrowing and poignant novel following two young women in pursuit of kinship and self-discovery who yearn to survive in a world that doesn’t know where either of them belong.

On a university campus in rural Qixian, Lin and Liz make an improbable pair: Lin, a Chinese student closer to her menagerie of pets than to her peers, and Liz, a Chinese American teacher grieving her mother’s sudden death. They’re each met with hostility—Lin by her classmates, who mock her for dating a white foreigner; Liz by her fellow English teachers, who exploit their privilege—and forge an unlikely friendship.

After a startling betrayal that results in Lin’s expulsion, they swap places. Lin becomes convinced to pursue her degree at a community college near Liz’s Ohio hometown, while Liz searches for answers as to what drove her parents to leave China before she was born. But when a global catastrophe deepens the fissures between modern-day China and an increasingly fractured United States, Lin and Liz—far from home and estranged from themselves—are forced to confront both the familiar and the strange in each other.

Unspooling over the course of a single extraordinary year in our not-yet-distant past and in small towns from Dandong to Deadwood, Transplants is a piercing story of migration, belonging, and the parts of ourselves that get lost in translation. Alternating between Liz and Lin’s perspectives, it is a lyrical and moving exploration of race, love, power, and freedom that illuminates the limits and possibilities of what can happen when we open ourselves to the unknown and reveals how even our fiercest differences may bring us closer than we might ever imagine.

Daniel Tam-Claiborne is a multiracial writer, multimedia producer, and nonprofit director. He is the author of the short story collection What Never Leaves, and his writing has appeared in Catapult, Literary Hub, Off Assignment, The Rumpus, HuffPost, and elsewhere. A 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, he has also received support from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Kundiman, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and others. Daniel holds degrees from Oberlin College, Yale University, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle.

Joyce Chen is a writer, editor, and community builder who draws inspiration from many coastal cities. She was the 2022-24 Hugo House writer-in-residence, and was a 2019-2020 Hugo House Fellow. Her work has been published in Rolling Stone, Poets & Writers, Lit Hub, Narratively, and Slant’d, among others, and she contributes book reviews to Orion and Hyphen magazines. She has received support through Hugo House, VONA, Tin House, Artist Trust, Vermont Studio Center, Centrum, and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and she is an essayist interested in topics like time, silence, and liminal spaces as they relate to agency, power, and intercultural understanding. Joyce is a co-founding member of Seventh Wave.

Books will be available to purchase on-site from Elliott Bay Book Company. Free entry with registration. Surprise guests and afterparty to follow–you won't want to miss it!