Since first arriving in the country as a Peace Corps volunteer 20 years ago, Cal alum Michael Meyer has witnessed China from the village and neighborhood level. His writing combines immersive reporting, memoir and archival research, and has appeared in the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Time, Smithsonian, Foreign Policy, and on This American Life. A Whiting Award winner for nonfiction and a Guggenheim Fellow, Meyer wrote an award-winning first book, The Last Days of Old Beijing, which documents daily life in the capital’s oldest neighborhood as the city remade itself for the Olympics. His second book, published this month, In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China depicts life on a family’s rice farm as it becomes a corporate agribusiness. Meyer will show slides from his research, and talk about the challenges of reporting from China and how a freelance writer can fund and produce books that reach a wide audience.