Monday, January 25, 2021
8:00 p.m. ET
This month, The Great Gatsby entered the public domain, as shared in this piece from NPR. No longer bound by copyright, the popular book will undoubtedly become less expensive and therefore more accessible to readers. Though its original release was unsuccessful, it has gone on to fascinate readers from all walks of life for decades. Join us in a discussion of the current relevance of The Great Gatsby with award-winning authors and educators who know it well: Min Jin Lee, Kiley Reid, and Victor Malo-Juvera. The discussion, moderated by Tricia Ebarvia, will include conversation about the book’s enduring themes and will also offer more recent texts to pair with Gatsby for classroom exploration and discussion. For more, check out this post titled “Disrupting The Great Gatsby.”
ABOUT THE PANEL
MIN JIN LEE is the author of the New York Times–bestselling novel Pachinko—which was a finalist for the National Book Award and one of the Ten Best Books of 2017 selected by the New York Times Book Review—and of the nationally bestselling novel Free Food for Millionaires. A writer in residence at Amherst College and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, she lives in New York.
Photo credit: Art Streiber
KILEY REID, an Arizona native, is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was the recipient of a Truman Capote fellowship. Her New York Times–bestselling debut novel, Such a Fun Age, is in development by Lena Waithe’s Hillman Grad Productions and Sight Unseen Pictures. The novel was long-listed for the 2020 Booker Prize and chosen as a finalist for the New York Public Library’s 2020 Young Lions Fiction Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author, and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Kiley’s writing has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Playboy, December, Lumina (where her short story won the 2017 Flash Prose Contest), and Ploughshares (where her short story won the 2020 Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction). Kiley lives in Philadelphia.
Photo credit: David Goddard
DR. VICTOR MALO-JUVERA is an associate professor of English education at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and a former secondary public school English teacher. He coedited Critical Approaches to Teaching the High School Novel: Reinterpreting Canonical Literature (2018), Critical Explorations of Young Adult Literature: Identifying and Critiquing the Canon (2019), and Breaking the Taboo with Young Adult Literature (2020). His scholarship has been published in journals such as Research in the Teaching of English, Teachers College Record, English Journal, and Teaching and Teacher Education. Victor serves on the executive board of ALAN and on the editorial boards of English Journal, SIGNAL Journal, and Study and Scrutiny: Research on Young Adult Literature.
TRICIA EBARVIA is a high school English teacher with twenty years of experience. She is a codirector at the Pennsylvania Writing and Literature Project, a Heinemann Fellow, and a cofounder of #DisruptTexts and #31DaysIBPOC. Tricia believes that in order for students to become responsible, engaged participants in their communities, educators must teach from a stance of antibias and critical literacy. As a literacy consultant, she works with teachers on topics including independent reading, mentor texts, digital literacies, antibias and antiracist pedagogy, and curriculum design. Tricia’s work has been featured in various publications, including NCTE’s English Journal and the New York Times. She can be found online at @triciaebarvia and triciaebarvia.org.