TRANSPLANTS | A Busboys and Poets Books Presentation
Date and Time
May 25, 2025 5:00 pm
Location
450K
450 K St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20001
May 25, 2025 5:00 pm
450K
Join us to discuss this harrowing and poignant novel about the pursuit of kinship and self-discovery
A harrowing and poignant novel following two young women in pursuit of kinship and self-discovery who yearn to survive in a world that doesn’t know where either of them belong.
On a university campus in rural Qixian, Lin and Liz make an improbable pair: Lin, a Chinese student closer to her menagerie of pets than to her peers, and Liz, a Chinese American teacher grieving her mother’s sudden death. They’re each met with hostility—Lin by her classmates, who mock her for dating a white foreigner; Liz by her fellow English teachers, who exploit their privilege—and forge an unlikely friendship.
After a startling betrayal that results in Lin’s expulsion, they swap places. Lin becomes convinced to pursue her degree at a community college near Liz’s Ohio hometown, while Liz searches for answers as to what drove her parents to leave China before she was born. But when a global catastrophe deepens the fissures between modern-day China and an increasingly fractured United States, Lin and Liz—far from home and estranged from themselves—are forced to confront both the familiar and the strange in each other.
Unspooling over the course of a single extraordinary year in our not-yet-distant past and in small towns from Dandong to Deadwood, Transplants is a piercing story of migration, belonging, and the parts of ourselves that get lost in translation. Alternating between Liz and Lin’s perspectives, it is a lyrical and moving exploration of race, love, power, and freedom that illuminates the limits and possibilities of what can happen when we open ourselves to the unknown and reveals how even our fiercest differences may bring us closer than we might ever imagine.
Daniel Tam-Claiborne is joining us on the Busboys stage alongside Tom Pellman to dive deeper into this “gorgeously written, complex, and profoundly moving meditation on place, language, and belonging…” (Lauren Groff, NYT bestselling author of The Vaster Wilds). Copies of the book will be available for purchase during and after the event, and Tam-Claiborne will be signing following the program.
This event is free and open to all. Our program begins at 5:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of TRANSPLANTS will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please note that this event is in person and will not be livestreamed.
We ask that guests RSVP in order to receive direct updates about the event from Busboys and Poets Books
Daniel Tam-Claiborne is a multiracial writer, multimedia producer, and nonprofit director. He is the author of the short story collection What Never Leaves, and his writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Catapult, Literary Hub, Off Assignment, The Rumpus, HuffPost, and elsewhere. A 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, he has also received support from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Kundiman, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and others. Daniel holds degrees from Oberlin College, Yale University, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle.
Tom Pellman is a writer based in Washington, DC. He lived in China for over a decade, working as a business journalist and consultant. He was fiction editor of the Beijing-based writers' collective The Anthill and co-edited and contributed to While We're Here, an anthology of The Anthill's best work. This first novel, The Soul of Beijing, was published by Camphor Press in 2022.
