Bodies of Work: A Conversation with Yiyun Li and Ed Park

Yiyun Li is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction, including most recently Things in Nature Merely Grow (FSG), which won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir, the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal, and was a finalist for the National Book Award and PEN/Jean Stein Award. She is the recipient of the PEN/Faulkner Award, an International Writer Award from the Royal Society of Literature, and a MacArthur Fellowship, among other honors. She was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and is currently the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. Photo by Hannah Yoon.

Ed Park is the author of the novels Same Bed Different Dreams, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Personal Days, the story collection An Oral History of Atlantis, and most recently, the memoir Three Tenses. His hardcover illustrated volume, The Repairer of Reputations, is forthcoming this fall (all Random House). In 2025, he received the Deborah Pease Prize from A Public Space and the Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Brigid Hughes is the founding editor of the literary and arts magazine A Public Space, and A Public Space Books. She lives in New York City.