Booking and details
Dates & TicketsDates Thu, Jan 16, 2025 at 6:30pm ET
Venue Folger Virtual
Tickets Free, registration required
How do we live with the things that haunt us? This is the question at the center of Artist Fellow Jami Nakamura Lin’s speculative novel-in-essays The Girls of Godzilla, Illinois. This unique novel sets folklore—from both Edo period Japan and early modern Europe—against a suburban Chicago community equally haunted by the ghosts of the Protestant Reformation, the Meiji Restoration, and World War II incarceration.
Join us online for a virtual interview with Jami, where we’ll discuss collective memory, shifting attitudes toward ghosts, responsibility of the living to the dead, and the role of speculative fiction as a site of possibility and resistance. The interview will be followed by a selected reading from The Girls of Godzilla, Illinois and space for Q&A.
About the author
Jami Nakamura Lin
Jami Nakamura Lin is the author of the illustrated speculative memoir The Night Parade (Mariner Books/HarperCollins), a Chicago Review of Books Award finalist and a Boston Globe Best Book of 2023. A former Catapult columnist, she’s been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Passages North, and other publications. She has received fellowships and support from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, Macdowell, Yaddo, We Need Diverse Books, Folger Shakespeare Library, and more. She received her MFA in nonfiction from Pennsylvania State University and lives in the Chicago area.
About Folger Institute
The Folger Institute is a center for early modern research at the Folger Shakespeare Library that brings public audiences together with researchers to explore the cultures and legacies of the early modern world. Learn more.
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