Join Crystal Hana Kim CC’09, SOA’14, in conversation with Hannah Lillith Assadi CC'08 SOA'13, as she discusses finding community in our darkest moments. Inspired by real events, Kim was haunted when she learned of reformatory facilities in South Korea where citizens were imprisoned, often abused and sometimes killed, by their own government. In The Stone Home, a hauntingly-poetic family drama and coming-of-age story, Kim reveals a dark corner of South Korean history through the eyes of a small community living in a reformatory center. This is a free event but you may purchase a signed copy of The Stone Home online from Book Culture by January 3, 2025.

Crystal Hana Kim is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels The Stone Home (2024) and If You Leave Me, which was a Booklist Editor’s Choice title and named a best book of 2018 by over a dozen publications. Kim is the recipient of the 2022 National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” Award and is a 2017 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize winner. Currently, she is the visiting assistant professor at Queens College and a contributing editor at Apogee Journal. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her family.

Hannah Lillith Assadi is the author of Sonora (Soho 2017), which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her second novel The Stars Are Not Yet Bells (Riverhead 2022) was named a New Yorker and NPR best book of 2022. Her third novel Paradiso 17, inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father, is forthcoming from Knopf in 2026. She teaches fiction at the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Pratt Institute. In 2018, she was named a '5 under 35' honoree by the National Book Foundation.