Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston is a highly acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction and one of the first Asian Americans to make it to the top of the literary world in America. Her first book, a memoir published in 1976 called The Women Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, won the National Book Critic's Circle Award and made her a literary celebrity.

Kingston latest publication is an anthology of stories and poems by 80 veterans titled Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, which she edited. The anthology won the Northern California Book Critics Award.

China Men, a sequel to The Women Warrior, was published in 1980 and received the National Book Award and was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1989 Kingston published her first novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book which won the PEN Fiction Award. Kingston has also written Hawaii One Summer and helped edit the book Literature of California. Her recent works include To be the Poet, and The Fifth Book of Peace, which was nominated for The Dublin Literary Award.

Kingston graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1962 and returned a year later for a teaching certificate. In the early 1980s, she received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has been honored with the American Academy and Institute Award in Literature, California Governor's Award in the Arts, Hawaii Award for Literature, California Arts Commission Award and the Anisfield Wolf Book Award. Kingston was recognized as a "Living Treasure of Hawaii" in 1980.

Kingston's writing is often cited for its melodiousness and poetry - its exploration of myth, legend, history and autobiography combines to create a genre all to its own. Fearlessly creative and relentlessly brilliant, she shares worlds where imagination and reality collide, and truth is revealed.

Kingston was awarded the National Humanities Medal from President Clinton. She currently teaches at her alma mater, University of California at Berkeley.