Panel: Celebrating Traditions and Writing Magical Stories

In the spirit of Lunar New Year—a season of renewal, remembrance, and storytelling—local authors Yangsze Choo, Julie Leong, Aimee Phan and Julia Vee come together to explore how cultural traditions, folklore, and heritage inspire magical fiction. The conversation will examine reimagining history, weaving myth into contemporary narratives, and building fantastical worlds rooted in tradition while speaking to modern readers.

Yangsze Choo is the New York Times bestselling author of The Ghost Bride (now a Netflix original series) and The Night Tiger, a Reese’s Book Club Pick, and a Big Jubilee Read selection for Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee. She lives in California with her family and loves to eat and read (often at the same time). The Fox Wife and all previous novels would not have been possible without large quantities of dark chocolate.

Julie Leong is the USA Today and Sunday Times bestselling author of The Teller of Small Fortunes and The Keeper of Magical Things. A daughter of Malaysian Chinese immigrants and a Yale graduate, she works on self-driving cars and other tech once considered science fiction by day, and writes warm, magical fiction by night. She currently lives in San Francisco with her husband and dog and is unreasonably fond of spreadsheets and flambéeing things.

Aimee Phan is the author of The Reeducation of Cherry Truong (St. Martin's Press, 2012) and We Should Never Meet: Stories (St. Martin's Press, 2004), which was named a Notable Book by the Kiriyama Prize in fiction, as well as a finalist for the 2005 Asian American Literary Awards. Her fiction has appeared in Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Chelsea, Prairie Schooner and Meridian. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, USA Today, Guernica and the Oregonian. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the MacDowell Colony and Hedgebrook.

Julia Vee was that GenX kid raised by libraries and still remains unsupervised. She attended U.C Berkeley and majored in Asian Studies.  Ebony Gate, an Asian-inspired contemporary fantasy, was named a Golden Poppy Finalist for the Octavia E. Butler award. The final book in the Phoenix hoard trilogy, Pearl City, released in July of 2025.