Asian American Literature Today - Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center

Monique Truong is a Vietnamese American novelist, essayist, librettist, former refugee, avid eater, and intellectual property attorney (more or less in this order). Her novels are The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), and The Sweetest Fruits (Viking Books, 2019), which have earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship, American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship, PEN/Bingham Fellowship, Hodder Fellowship, and New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, among others. She is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University MFA Writing Program and has taught fiction workshops also at Princeton and Baruch College. She serves as vice president of the Authors Guild and is a member of Hedgebrook’s Creative Advisory Council and DVAN’s Advisory Committee.

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has published four volumes of poetry: The Darker Fall (Sarabande Books, 2002); Want (Sarabande Books, 2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize; Chord (Sarabande Books, 2015), winner of the UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize; and, most recently, The Galleons (Milkweed Editions, 2020). His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The New Republic, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University. He is also the poetry editor for New England Review.

Jason Oliver Chang is an Associate Professor of History and Asian/Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut where he also directs the Asian/Asian American Studies Institute. He is the author of Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico, 1880-1940, published with University of Illinois Press and co-editor of Asian America: A Primary Source Reader, published with Yale University Press. Other published work appears in the Pacific Historical Review, American Quarterly, and the Journal of Asian American Studies. He also serves on the Board of Education for the town of West Hartford, Connecticut.