On Friday night I’ll be introducing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as she opens the last event of Girls Write Now’s Chapters series with a reading from her short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck. I’ve written about my admiration for her work many times; since then, she’s won a MacArthur Fellowship and earned a place on The New Yorker’s 20 under 40 list.
Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, which I once stayed up until 5 a.m. on a work night to finish, centers on a girl about the same age as those Girls Write Now serves. My favorite of her short stories, “Cell One,” appears in the new collection.
At the event we’ll also debut our 2010 anthology, which features an introduction by Nami Mun, whose Chapters reading from Miles from Nowhere earlier this year was astonishingly good. The event will be held at the Center for Fiction, starting at 6 p.m.
