Alta Journal / May 24, 2022

Thirteen days after police officers beat Rodney King in Los Angeles in March 1991, another instance of videotaped violence occurred in Compton. Korean liquor store owner Soon Ja Du shot a 15-year-old Black girl, Latasha Harlins, in the back of her head, killing her over a bottle of orange juice Harlins had intended to pay for. Both of these events served as flash points for the deadly L.A. riots the following year.

Alta Journal / May 26, 2022

When I visited Steph Cha at her home just outside Koreatown immediately after the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in late April—the first time we’d seen each other since February 2020—we had a great deal to catch up on. Over the next hour and a half, interrupted by the train-focused exclamations of her two-year-old son, Leo (whose younger sibling is due this fall), we updated each other on our lives, enduring the pandemic, mutual writer friends. Too quickly it was time for me to get to my next meeting, and my questions about Your House Will Pay, the June selection of the California Book Club, had to wait for a phone call with Cha the following week.

Alta Journal / June 17, 2022

To kick off the discussion of Steph Cha’s extraordinary novel Your House Will Pay, California Book Club host John Freeman asked Cha to speak about the book’s relationship to the real-life death of Latasha Harlins, a teenager whose killing by a Korean convenience store owner was a factor in the subsequent L.A. uprising, and the atmosphere within Cha’s own family at the time. Cha explained, “I was five in 1991, when Latasha was killed, and I was six at the time of the uprising. I grew up in the Valley, the San Fernando Valley, and kind of cut off from the stuff that was happening in Koreatown and South Central L.A.—that was not really part of my childhood or my universe.”

Publishing Perspectives / March 15, 2023

The 74th edition of the National Book Awards program based in New York City has opened submissions and named its 25 jurors.

National Book Foundation / March 15, 2023

Steph Cha is the author of Your House Will Pay, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a California Book Award, and the Juniper Song crime trilogy. Sarah Park Dahlen is an Associate Professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She researches Asian American youth literature and transracial Korean adoption.