Join authors Scott Alexander Howard and Jen Sookfong Lee as they explore the weight of memory across time and generations. In one story, a girl faces a life-altering choice in a town shaped by its past and future; in the other, a family confronts the haunting legacy of inherited trauma. Both blur the line between the real and the speculative, asking: what do we carry forward—and at what cost?
Location: Room 485, UBC Robson Square
Moderator: Aaron Chapman
Readers: Scott Alexander Howard, The Other Valley (Simon & Schuster) | Jen Sookfong Lee, The Hunger We Pass Down(Penguin Random House)
About The Moderator
Aaron Chapman
Aaron Chapman is a writer, historian, and musician with a special interest in Vancouver's entertainment history. He is the author of Vancouver after Dark: The Wild History of a City's Nightlife, winner of the Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award (BC Book Prizes) in 2020; The Last Gang in Town, the story of Vancouver's Clark Park Gang; Liquor, Lust, and the Law, the story of Vancouver's Penthouse Nightclub, now available in a second edition; Vancouver Vice: Crime and Spectacle in the City's West End; and Live at the Commodore, a history of the Commodore Ballroom that won the Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award (BC Book Prizes) in 2015 (with a new updated edition recently published). He has sat on the board of the Friends of the Vancouver Archives, and is a member of Heritage Vancouver. In 2020 he was elected as a member of the Royal Historical Society. A graduate of the University of British Columbia, he lives in Vancouver.
About The Readers
Jen Sookfong Lee
JEN SOOKFONG LEE was born and raised in Vancouver’s East Side, and she now lives with her son in North Burnaby. Her books include The Conjoined, nominated for International Dublin Literary Award and a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, The Better Mother, a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award, The End of East, The Shadow List, and Finding Home. Jen acquires and edits for ECW Press.
Scott Alexander Howard
Scott Alexander Howard lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. He has a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Toronto and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, where his work focused on the relationship between memory, emotion, and literature. His first novel, The Other Valley, won the 2025 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and is a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. The Other Valley has been translated into German, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Korean, and is being developed as a TV series by Universal Studios.
