ICW Presents “Writing the Golden State”
Thu., Feb. 13, 2025, 12–1 p.m.
Free with reservation
Livestream
Join the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West for a discussion about California’s past and present with Jennifer Carr, Wendy Cheng, David Helps, and David Ulin, contributors to the new book Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California. The book explores California through 25 essays that look beyond the clichés of the “California dream,” portraying a state that is deviant and recalcitrant, proud and humble, joyful and communal. Join us for a multifaceted and exciting dialogue as we explore the individuals, communities, and events that have made California a richly diverse state.
About the Speakers
Jennifer Carr is a writer from San Pedro, California, and a USC alumna (class of 2001). Her fiction and nonfiction grapple with what life in a globalized, automated world means for union towns like San Pedro, where immigrant families have come to live, work, and stay for generations. Aside from her essay in Writing the Golden State, Carr’s work has appeared in Zócalo Public Square, Boom California, and the Baltimore Review, among others. She teaches creative writing at Chapman University.
Wendy Cheng is professor of American studies and ethnicity at USC. She is the author of Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism (University of Washington Press, 2023) and The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and co-author of A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2012). Her creative nonfiction essays have been published in the Cincinnati Review, Boom California, Zócalo Public Square, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and they have been nominated for the University of Iowa Krause Essay Prize and the Pushcart Prize, as well as selected as a notable essay in the Best American Essays and for inclusion in the Best Spiritual Literature anthology.
David Helps is an urban historian and writer from southwestern Ontario, Canada, and the territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe peoples. His research has been published in the Journal of Urban History and American Quarterly, and his essays and reportage have appeared in The Nation, Public Books, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. Currently a postdoctoral fellow at USC, he is writing his first book: a people’s history of global Los Angeles.
David Ulin is professor of the Practice of English at USC and editor of the journal Air/Light. He is the author or editor of nearly 20 books, including Thirteen Question Method; Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay; and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. The former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times, he has written for The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review, and the New York Times; his essay “Bed” was selected for The Best American Essays 2020. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and Ucross Foundation, as well as a COLA-IMAP Master Artist Grant from the city of Los Angeles. Currently the books editor at Alta Journal, he has also edited Didion: The 1960s & 70s, Didion: The 1980s & 90s, and Didion: Memoirs & Later Writings for Library of America.
About the Organization
The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW) is a center for scholarly investigation of the history and culture of California and the American West. Through sponsorship of innovative scholarship, research, and programming, ICW draws on the resources of USC and the Huntington Library to build a unique collaboration among a research university, a research library, and the public.