On Tuesday, March 4 at 5:30pm in the Stevenson Library, Hua Hsu and Thomas Gebremedhin will come together for a discussion on their careers in writing and publishing, followed by a reading from Hua Hsu’s 2022 memoir Stay True. Introduced and moderated by John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and director of the Written Arts Program Dinaw Mengestu, this event is free and open to the Bard community. 

This event is part of the Center for Ethics and Writing’s semester long symposium Writing the Present.

Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a professor of Literature at Bard College. Hsu serves on the executive board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. He was formerly a fellow at the New America Foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his family.

Thomas Gebremedhin, Vice President and Executive Editor, joined Doubleday in 2020 following nearly a decade in magazines. His first acquisition at Doubleday was Hua Hsu’s Stay True, which was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. Stay True was also named one of the New York Times 100 best books of the 21st century. The first work of fiction that Thomas published at Doubleday, Beautiful Days by Zach Williams, was named one of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of  2024. In addition to Hsu and Williams, Thomas works with Maaza Mengiste,  Kyle Chayka, Benjamin Moser, Amanda Hess, Jen Percy, Eric Puchner,  Nell Irvin Painter, Julie Phillips, David Klion, Tao Leigh Goffe, and Richard Rhodes, among others. His authors have won or been finalists for the  Pulitzer Prize, the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award,  and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and they have been cited on the  annual New York Times Best Books of the Year list among many other best of lists. They have also made the New York Times bestseller list. 

Prior to Doubleday, Thomas was a print editor at The Atlantic as well as  the magazine’s fiction editor. Since joining Doubleday, he has acquired and  developed works of memoir, biography, history, criticism, essays, and  literary fiction; he is drawn to writers who interrogate themes of cultural,  sociological, intellectual, or personal significance. A graduate of the Iowa  Writers’ Workshop (MFA), he believes that the best books begin at the  level of the sentence.