Please join First Light Books in celebrating Lana Lin's impossibly innovative book THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF H. LAN THAO LAM, longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award in nonfiction.

The event will begin with an author reception from 6–6:30 p.m. Tickets include a copy of the book and a reserved seat. Unreserved seats are available on a first come, first served basis. Free RSVPs are also encouraged.

About the book

In her 1933 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein invented a new literary form by narrating her own story from the perspective of her partner, blurring the lines between portrait and self-portrait. Almost a century later, experimental filmmaker and artist Lana Lin has resurrected Stein’s project to tell a different story of queer love, life, and artistic collaboration.

At heart a candid chronicle of her partner Lan Thao’s life journey from Việt Nam during the war, and her own troubled history as a gender-queer Taiwanese American, Lin draws in subjects as varied as photography, cancer, tropical fruit, 9/11, and Eve Sedgwick’s eyeglasses, weaving an intimate landscape of living that is also a critical investigation of race and gender.

About the authors

Lana Lin is a multidisciplinary artist and writer based in New York and Connecticut. She is the author of The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2025), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer (Fordham, 2017). Her film, The Cancer Journals Revisited (2018), won Best Feature Documentary at the San Diego Asian American Film Festival and Favorite Experimental Film at BlackStar Film Festival. Her individual works and collaborative mixed media projects (as “Lin + Lam”) have been shown at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, REDCAT contemporary arts center, LA, China Taipei Film Archive, BAMcinemaFest, Brooklyn, Gasworks, London, Museum of Modern Art, NY, and the 2018 Busan Biennale, among other venues. Her writing has been published in LitHub, Portable Gray, ASAP/Journal, Millennium Film Journal, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and Asian American Literary Review. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Wexner Center for the Arts, and four MacDowell residencies since 1996.

She'll be joined in conversation by Deb Olin Unferth, the author of six books, including the novels Barn 8 and Vacation; the memoir Revolution, finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award; two story collections; and the graphic novel I, Parrot. Her fiction and essays have appeared in over fifty magazines and journals, including Harper’s, the New York Times, The Paris Review, Granta, and McSweeney’s. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes, a Creative Capital Fellowship for Innovative Literature, fellowships from the MacDowell, Yaddo, and Ucross residencies. Deb is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches for the Michener Center, the New Writers’ Project, and she also directs the Pen City Writers, the prison creative-writing program at a south Texas penitentiary.