Lettres d'Amérique: Jenny Zhang & Roberto Rodriguez-Estrada

A virtual conversation between Jenny Zhang and Roberto Rodriguez-Estrada hosted by Alice McCrum, Programs Manager at the American Library in Paris. (Filmed on Zoom with a live audience on 13/09/2021.)

Jenny Zhang’s latest poetry collection, My Baby First Birthday, interrogates what it means to be born into and grow up in a world that fetishizes womanhood, upholds the patriarchy, and extols whiteness. All the while implicating her reader, Zhang offers moments of tenderness, radiant beauty, and compassion.

Zhang was born in Shanghai and grew up in New York. An author, poet and essayist, her work has been published in the New York Times, BuzzFeed, and Rookie, among others. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University, Zhang has also written for television and TV. She lives in New York City where she is working on a novel and screenplay.

Roberto Rodriguez-Estrada is poet and writer from California. They are currently completing an MFA in Fiction from the University of Virginia, where they are a Poe-Faulkner Fellow. They are at work on a novel and a collection of poems.

This conversation is part of the Lettres d’Amérique conversation series organized by the American Library in Paris, the U.S. Embassy in France, Festival America and Transfuge magazine. For more information about the series, please visit: americanlibraryinparis.org/lettres.