Join the incomparable Maxine Hong Kingston, alongside bestselling and award-winning authors Aimee Liu and Pete Hsu, in a riveting conversation moderated by Lily Hoang at Commonwealth Club World Affairs in San Francisco on Thursday, September 11, 2025. 

It'll be a beautiful evening of literary readings and discussion about the impact of America’s current politics on marginalized writers, readers, and independent presses. Without NEA and NIH funding, what is the fate of literary diversity in America? What can publishers do to prevent erasure of BIPOC perspectives? What can artists do to defend their legacy and protect the future for imagination, creativity, and radical inclusivity? And what rich reserves of literary history can we all draw upon to embolden the voices of resistance in our modern reckoning? We invite you to participate in an urgent exploration of the good, the bad, and the courageous in publishing today.

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.

Pete Hsu is a Taiwanese American author of the short story collection If I Were The Ocean, I’d Carry You Home (Red Hen Press, 2022) and the experimental chapbook There Is A Man (Tolsun Books). His writing has also been featured in The Los Angeles Review, The Bare Life Review, F(r)iction Magazine, Faultline Journal of Arts and Letters, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and others. He was a 2017 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow and the 2017 PEN in the Community Writer in Residence. He teaches at the UCLA Extension Writers Program. He was born in Taipei, Taiwan and currently resides in Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley.