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Maxine Hong Kingston (b. 1940) is the author of many works of memoir, fiction, poetry, and essays. She has been the recipient of the National Book Award (for China Men), the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction (for The Woman Warrior), the PEN West Award for Fiction (for Tripmaster Monkey), an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a National Humanities Medal, and the National Medal of Arts. She is Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. Viet Thanh Nguyen (b. 1971), editor, is the author of the novel The Sympathizer, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His other books include, most recently, the story collection The Refugees, as well as Nothing Ever Dies- Vietnam and the Memory of War and Race and Resistance- Literature and Politics in Asian America. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and many other awards, he is currently the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He was a student of Kingston's at the University of California, Berkeley.
[Kingston's] transgressive willingness to go for broke made her a pioneering inspiration for the scads of wonderful writers who began mapping the territory she first opened. You can find her footprints in, among others, Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown and The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen, who edited this collection ... She opened up new territory for readers like me, too. Re-reading these books today, I've been struck by how much of what I now think of as conventional wisdom became so because of her unconventional work. In a way, Maxine Hong Kingston truly is an outlaw knot-maker, but her work doesn't make anyone go blind - it helps us to see. - John Powers, NPR / Fresh Air
