Lysley Tenorio visits campus April 8 as part of Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month

Short-story writer Lysley Tenorio will read from his work April 8 at CSU Monterey Bay. The public is invited to this free event.

Tenorio is the author of Monstress, which binds together eight tales of isolated misfits in San Francisco and the Philippines. They have been described as “tender” and “quirky,” written from the point of view of charlatans, B movie starlets, superhero obsessives and transgender cocktail waitresses.

NPR said of the stories: “Filipino traditions meet Californian modernity again and again, each encounter revealing something unexpected about both cultures.”

The roots of Tenorio's tales are buried in his family's decision to immigrate to California when he was 7 months old. He grew up in a home eager to assimilate.

His stories have appeared in The Atlantic magazine and The Best New American Voices and Pushcart Prize anthologies. A Whiting Writer's Award winner and a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he has received fellowships from the University of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Tenorio lives in San Francisco and is an associate professor at Saint Mary’s College of California.

The event will be held at 7 p.m. in the University Center living room, located on Sixth Avenue and B Street. While the reading is free, visitors must purchase a parking permit from a machine on the lot. Driving directions and a campus map are available here.

Tenorio’s appearance is part of CSUMB’s celebration of Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month and is part of a series of readings called Writers from the Edge. In March, poet Aimee Suzara read from her first full-length collection, Souvenir. The series started in February with a reading by novelist Keenan Norris.

For more information, contact Professor Ernest Stromberg at 582-3114.

The reading is sponsored by the Division of Humanities and Communication; the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences; Student Activities and Leadership Development; Asian Pacific Islander Association; and the Office of Inclusive Excellence.

Tenorio…has taken a uniquely Filipino-American perspective, polyglot and glittering with cinema dreams, and used it to make a bold collection of stories of the rejected, the helpless and the lost. Monstress is the debut of a singular talent. ?– NPR

*. . . refreshingly off-kilter…his stories are impeccably constructed, leading us calmly but insistently through the characters’ external and internal landscapes.* ?– The New York Times Book Review