Author Talk with Vanessa Hua + Nina Schuyler

Join us for a special event with Vanessa Hua, author of Coyoteland, and Nina Schuyler, author of Open the Floodgates. This event is free, but we appreciate your RSVP below so we can plan for your attendance.

"Coyoteland promises to be as dynamic and explosive a suburban drama as LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE." — LitHub | "Written with WITH, EMPATHY, and HEART." — Electric Lit | "Totally PROPULSIVE." — Ingrid Rojas Contreras | "A TOUR DE FORCE." — Kirstin Chen | "A tremendous, MESMERIZING gift." — R. O. Kwon | "UNFORGETTABLE." — J ean Kwok | "RIVETING." — Angie Kim
From the BESTSELLING author of A River of Stars comes a FUNNY, HEARTFELT novel set in an affluent Bay Area suburb where a Chinese American family moves in and sets off a series of scandals.
Living in El Nido, a privileged community in the hills east of Berkeley, is supposed to mean you’ve made it. So when Jin Chang moves there with his wife and daughters after years of scraping by, he hopes it will finally be the end of his bad luck. What his family doesn’t know is that he’s bending the rules for one final scheme: to make it big in real estate. Next door, Blair Belle prides herself on her progressive politics. After all, she treats their new nanny, Ana Rodriguez, and her daughter like family—even if she doesn’t know them all that well. But she can’t help but feel skeptical of the new neighbors, especially when she begins to suspect that Jin’s plans might interfere with the Belle’s own luxury development.
Jin’s teenage daughter Jane can tell her dad is keeping a secret, but she’s also struggling to navigate El Nido’s cliques. Tasha Washington has always felt isolated, too, as one of the only Black girls at the school. In the wake of a coyote attack, Jane and Tasha bond. Together, they hatch a plot to expose the town’s hypocrisies. The shockwaves will rock their own families. As fire season escalates, and the roaming coyote continues to unleash chaos, the characters become embroiled in a series of scandals that will change El Nido—and their own fates—forever.
Urgent, riveting, and deeply heartfelt, full of sharp wit and keen empathy, Coyoteland is at once a delicious suburban drama and an unflinching exploration of our current moment.

Vanessa Hua is the nationally-bestselling author of Coyoteland, A River of Stars, Forbidden City, and Deceit and Other Possibilities, a New York Times Editors' Pick. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a California Arts Council Fellowship, and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, among other honors. Previously an award-winning columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, she teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program and elsewhere. This fall, she will be an Ann Getty Endowed Visiting-Artist Scholar at the University of San Francisco. Her debut book of narrative nonfiction, Uprooted, is forthcoming.

Pronouns: She/Her

“A beautiful story with an urgent message: that we must learn to champion the rights of the natural world with at least the same zeal as we do human rights. Nina Schuyler writes with a lyric intensity that practically sings from the page. The metaphorical register in which she chose to tell this story invited me to join the chorus.” — Claire Oshetsky, author of award-winning novels Chouette and Poor Deer

We are in the midst of a profound legal shift: from New Zealand to India to Ecuador, real-world laws have granted personhood to rivers. With a mix of magic and pathos, Open the Floodgates imagines this new reality with a new configuration of the human and other-than-human relationship.

In an unnamed California town, the River is granted personhood and has the right--and urgent need--to argue in court for its existence. But powerful, well-funded enemies are determined to keep the River exactly as it is: gunk-filled, toxic, a convenient dumping ground for waste. The story moves like water, entering the minds of the town's people, pigeons, deer, dogs, cats, the trees, the River's home, and the River itself. When the River moves, the text winds its way along the page, mimicking water. When the River is ultimately jailed, the town faces a reckoning: what do we owe the River? And the River must answer in turn: what, if anything, does it owe humans?

NINA SCHUYLER is the author of four other fiction books and teaches creative writing at Stanford Continuing Studies and the independent bookstore, Book Passage. Nina Schuyler's newest short story collection, In this Ravishing World, won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections, and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature. It was also a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. She graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in Economics and earned a law degree at UC Law San Francisco. She is also the author of How to Write Stunning Sentences and has an extensive following of her Substack newsletter of the same name.