Join us in San Francisco July 21 for a special summer literary treat—hear from three award-winning Asian American California authors. Meet Oakland-based Maxine Hong Kingston, Aimmee Liu from Los Angeles, and Lily Hoang from San Diego.

About the Speakers

Maxine Hong Kingston, daughter of Chinese immigrants, is a literary pioneer, poet, memoirist, and fiction writer. She is the author of numerous nonfiction books including National Book Critics Circle Award-winner, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976) and National Book Award-winner China Men (1980). She also edited the anthology Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (2006), compiled from the work of participants in the therapeutic poetry workshops she has led for more than 500 veterans of war. Her honors include the National Medal of Arts (presented by former President Barack Obama), the National Endowment for the Humanities’ National Humanities Medal (presented by former President Bill Clinton), the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award in Literature, the National Book Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and has been named a Living Treasure of Hawaii. She is a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley and lives in Oakland, California.

Aimee Liu is the bestselling author of the novels Glorious Boy, Flash House, Cloud Mountain, and Face and the memoirs Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders and Solitaire. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, published as a Literary Guild Super Release, and serialized in Good Housekeeping. She’s received a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, a Bosque Fiction Prize, and special mention by the Pushcart Prize. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, Poets & Writers, and many other periodicals and anthologies. A past president of the national literary organization PEN Center USA, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College and is on the faculty of Goddard College’s MFA in Creative Writing Program at Port Townsend, WA. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

Lily Hoang is the author of five books, including the upcoming short story collection Timber & Lua (Red Hen Press, 2025) A Bestiary (finalist for a PEN USA Nonfiction Book Award) and Changing (recipient of a PEN Open Books Award). She has been a Mellon Fellow at Rhodes University in South Africa, a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell College, and a Cultural Exchange Faculty Fellow at Wuhan University in China. To date, she has taught creative writing on five continents. She currently teaches in the MFA Program at UC San Diego. She lives in San Diego, California.