Attica Locke & Celeste Ng in Conversation

Name: Attica Locke & Celeste Ng in Conversation
Start: 2026-04-14T19:30:00-05:00
End: 2026-04-14T21:00:00-05:00
Location: Northrop Auditorium

Schedule

Tue Apr 14 2026 at 07:30 pm to 09:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

Northrop Auditorium | Minneapolis, MN

The Esther Freier Lectures in Literature Series presents bestselling authors Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere, and Attica Locke, author of the Highway 59 trilogy and a screenwriter who adapted Little Fires Everywhere for Hulu. Professor V. V. Ganeshananthan will moderate this conversation, a special event celebrating 25 years of the Freier series.
This in-person event is free with registration at z.umn.edu/Freier25th. Live captioning and ASL provided. For further questions about accessibility services and the venue, please email [email protected] or call 612-626-1528. Presented by the Department of English and co-sponsored by Asian American Studies and The Loft Literary Center.
Attica Locke is a New York Times bestselling author whose sixth novel Guide Me Home, the finale of her Edgar-Award winning Highway 59 trilogy, joins Bluebird, Bluebird and Heaven, My Home. She is also the author of Pleasantville, winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and long-listed for the Bailey’s Prize for Women’s Fiction; The Cutting Season, winner of the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence; and her debut Black Water Rising, which was nominated for an Edgar Award, an NAACP Image Award, as well as a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was short-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. A former fellow at the Sundance Institute’s Feature Filmmaker’s Lab, Locke is also a screenwriter and TV producer, with credits that include Empire, When They See Us, and the Emmy-nominated Little Fires Everywhere, for which she won an NAACP Image award for television writing. She co-created and executive produced an adaptation of her sister Tembi Locke’s memoir From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home for Netflix. She is currently in a multi-year development deal with Universal Television, working on the adaptation of her Highway 59 series, among other shows.
Celeste Ng is the author of three novels: Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts. Her first novel, Everything I Never Told You, was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications. Everything I Never Told You was also the winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the ALA’s Alex Award. It has been translated into over 30 languages and is being adapted for the screen. Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, was a #1 New York Times bestseller, a #1 Indie Next bestseller, and Amazon's Best Fiction Book of 2017. It was named a best book of the year by over 25 publications and the winner of the Ohioana Award and the Goodreads Readers Choice Award 2017 in Fiction, and spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Little Fires Everywhere has been published abroad in more than 30 languages and has been adapted as a limited series on Hulu, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. Her third novel, Our Missing Hearts (2022) was an instant New York Times bestseller.
Celeste Ng grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. She attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan). Her fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, and many other publications, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors.