Anelise Chen was born in Taipei and moved with her family to Los Angeles in 1990. She earned her B.A. from U.C. Berkeley and her M.F.A. from NYU. She is now Director of Undergraduate Studies in Creative Writing at Columbia University, where she teaches fiction. Chen is the author of So Many Olympic Exertions (Kaya Press), a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 Awardee. Her essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications such as The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, Believer Magazine, BOMB, and Conjunctions. She has received residencies and fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Blue Mountain Center, Banff Centre, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. Her next book, Clam Down (One World Random House), based on her mollusk column for the Paris Review, will be published in 2025. She lives in New Haven with her family.Danny Tunick performs and conducts music ranging from Pierre Boulez to hardcore punk. His performances in the rock, jazz, and experimental and classical music genres have been recorded and released on over forty record labels. He is currently most often seen performing in a dress with the band Sugarlife. Mr. Tunick would like to express his gratitude to Eugene Lim for the innumerable opportunities which Mr. Lim has granted him in this life.Donald Breckenridge has written five novels including And Then (Black Sparrow Press 2017) and As It Falls (Ellipsis Press 2023), he has edited two fiction anthologies, and introduced the NYRB Classics edition of Henri Duchemin and His Shadows by Emmanuel Bove. He was the fiction editor of The Brooklyn Rail for nineteen years, and co-founded and co-edited InTranslation. He is currently working on a new novel. Eugene Lim is the author of Choir and of the novels Fog & Car, The Strangers, Dear Cyborgs, and Search History.
He works as a school librarian, runs Ellipsis Press, and lives in Queens, New York.Lisa Hsiao Chen is the author of Mouth (Kaya Press) and Activities of Daily Living (W.W. Norton), a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and Gotham Book Prize and selected by The New Yorker, Vogue, and Publishers Weekly as a Best Book of 2022.She is the co-founder with Eugene Lim of the Tehching Hsieh Free Thinking Group. Born in Taipei, she now lives in Brooklyn.

Ear to the Ground recalls a practice of paying attention to sounds and vibrations that travel through the land, allowing the listener to predict the arrival of animals, trains, other humans, or the presence of flows in the underground as well as even more intangible phenomena. In this series of public programs, we look into spectral practices: forms of acquiring knowledge beyond the reach of eye that require building trust and depend on intuition. Might invisible sensations, ghostly feelings, or dreamlike perception allow us to anticipate and imagine possible futures? Might they help us in turning away from destructive, divisive acts of conspiracy to forms of conjecture that are creative and deeply informed by their earthly context?