Prose at The Poetry Center: R.O. Kwon and Nona Caspers

R.O. Kwon

R.O. Kwon is the author of The Incendiaries (Riverhead/Virago), selected as an American Booksellers Association Indie Next No. 1 Great Read and Indies Introduce selection. The book is being translated into four languages. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Vice, BuzzFeed, Noon, Time, Playboy and elsewhere. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Born in South Korea, she has mostly lived in the U.S.

Nona Caspers

Nona Caspers’ The Fifth Woman: A Novel in Stories (Sarabande Books, 2018) was selected by Stacy D’erasmo for the Mary McCarthy Award. Her story “The Party (a.k.a. “Frontiers”) was selected by Best American Short Stories as a Distinguished Story of 2016. Caspers’ other books of fiction include Heavier Than Air, awarded the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and listed as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and Little Book of Days. In 2013 she co-edited Lawfully Wedded Wives: Rethinking Marriage in the 21st Century.

Her work has been supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant, Barbara Deming Memorial Grant and Award, LAMBDA Literary Award nomination and Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award. Stories have appeared in numerous literary reviews, including Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Ontario Review and The Sun. She joined SF State in 2002.

Photo of R.O. Kwon by Smeeta Mahanti