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Abigail Savitch-Lew

Biography

Abigail Savitch-Lew

Abigail Savitch-Lew is a writer of fiction and nonfiction and an American of Jewish and Chinese (Ashkenazi and Toisanese) descent. She has a BA in literary arts from Brown University and an MFA in fiction from Rutgers University-Newark. She is the author of the novel LIVONIA CHOW MEIN, and her short stories have been published in The Round, Post Road, The Best Teen Writing of 2010 and The Apprentice Writer. Previously, she was a staff reporter for City Limits, an Asian American Writers’ Workshop Margins Fellow, and an adjunct professor of creative writing at Rutgers. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the artist Emmanuel Knight, her sister-in-law, and their cat.

Abigail Savitch-Lew

Books by Abigail Savitch-Lew

Livonia Chow Mein
by Abigail Savitch-Lew - Fiction

In 1978, two tenements on Livonia Avenue in Brownsville burn to the ground, killing one resident and displacing dozens of others. It remains unclear who set the buildings ablaze, but the survivors are convinced the culprit is Mr. Wong. Who exactly is Mr. Wong, and what allegedly drove him to this extraordinary act of violence, is the question that consumes this novel as it plunges into four generations of Wong family history. Joining together the present and the past is the community organizer Lina Rodriguez Armstrong, who was also displaced by that fire and who has spent the intervening years fighting for the rights of Brownsville’s residents and organizing a Livonia Avenue community land trust.