PORT ANGELES — Peninsula College’s Studium Generale program will welcome novelist Sanjena Sathian for a reading and conversation online at 12:30 p.m. Thursday.

Sathian is the author of “Gold Diggers” (Penguin Press, April 2021), which was long listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and chosen as an Amazon Best of 2021 pick, a Good Morning America Buzz pick, a best book of April by CNN, Bustle and Entertainment Weekly.

To join the free event, go to https://pencol-edu.zoom.us/j/82027861421. The meeting ID is 820 2786 1421.

The novel is a coming-of-age book about high school student Neil Narayan in the Bush-era suburbs of Atlanta.

“Sathian’s superpower is being able to give readers a crash course in the immigrant experience of the American Dream, while simultaneously — and with the aid of magical realism — nailing answers to universal questions, such as, ‘Was the indignity of your teenage self always so close at hand, long after you thought you’d escaped?’” said Vannessa Cronin in an Amazon book review.

Sathian is working now on the television adaptation with Mindy Kaling’s production company, Kaling International.

Her short fiction, essays and journalism can be found in The Atlantic, Conjunctions, Boulevard, The New Yorker, The New York Times and Time.

Sathian is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received a Michener-Copernicus Fellowship and a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow.