Akil Kumarasamy with EJ Koh

Acclaimed short story writer Akil Kumarasamy visits the store to discuss her debut novel Meet Us by the Roaring Sea with local favorite E.J. Koh. In Meet Us by the Roaring Sea, a young woman finds her mother’s body starfished on the kitchen floor in Queens and sets on a journey through language, archives, artificial intelligence, and TV for a way back into herself. She begins to translate an old manuscript about a group of female medical students—living through a drought and at the edge of the war—as they create a new way of existence to help the people around them. In the process, the translator’s life and the manuscript begin to become entangled. Along the way, the arrival of a childhood friend, a stranger, and an unusual AI project will force her to question her own moral compass and sense of goodness. How involved are we in the suffering of others? What does real compassion look like? How do you make a better world? Akil Kumarasamy is the author of the collection Half Gods (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, awarded the Bard Fiction Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. The linked story collection reveals with sharp clarity the ways that parents, children, and friends act as unknowing mirrors to each other, revealing in their all-too human weaknesses, hopes, and sorrows a connection to the divine. Most recently, she is the author of the debut novel Meet Us by the Roaring Sea (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), which was selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Kumarasamy’s work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, American Short Fiction, BOMB, and other publications. She has received fellowships from the University of East Anglia, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. E. J. Koh is the author of the memoir The Magical Language of Others (Tin House Books, 2020), a Washington State Book Award Winner, Pacific Northwest Book Award Winner, Association of Asian American Studies Book Award Winner, and PEN Open Book Award Longlist. Koh is the author of the poetry collection A Lesser Love (Louisiana State U. Press, 2017), Pleiades Editors Prize for Poetry Winner. She is the co-translator of Yi Won’s poetry collection The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (Zephyr Press, 2021) and the librettist for the opera adaptation of Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden supported by Opera America. Koh is the recipient of the 2022 Artistic Achievement Award from the Korean American Coalition of Washington. Koh has received fellowships from the American Literary Translators Association, MacDowell, and Kundiman. Her poems, stories, and translations have appeared in AGNI, The Atlantic, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, Slate, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. Koh earned her MFA at Columbia University in New York for Creative Writing and Literary Translation. Koh is a PhD candidate at the University of Washington in English Literature studying Korean American literature, history, and film. Her debut novel The Liberators is forthcoming from Tin House fall 2023.

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