Author of the week: Bill Cheng

last updated 8 January 2015

Bill Cheng is making one bold debut, said Julie Bosman in The New York Times. Southern Cross the Dog, his novel about the travails of an African-American refugee of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, has received strong early reviews. Yet Southern readers might raise an eyebrow at the fact that its Queens, N.Y.–born Chinese-American author has never set foot in the Deep South. “I don’t have the advantage of being from there, from that region, of that race,” says Cheng, now 29. “How do I justify this, you know, secret thing in my mind against an experience that I’ve never actually had? I don’t really have an answer for that.”

Even so, Cheng never doubted that he had a right to tell the tale, said Kelly McEvers in NPR.org. The book was inspired by the blues music the author long loved. “It is definitely a love note to those old blues players,” he says. “I knew I had to write about something that was both personal and important to me.” To imagine himself into the shoes of, say, a black man whipped by a white overseer, Cheng learned, he says, to extrapolate from his own memories of pain and fear. And camping out in a library didn’t hurt— allowing him to read deeply about the mind-sets, the music, and the speech patterns of 1920s Mississippi. “All that stuff doesn’t necessarily make it into the book. What it does is, it makes it into the writer,” he says. “It lends a certain confidence, and allows the writer to imagine, which is really what fiction’s about.”