Maxine Hong Kingston
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Maxine Hong Kingston (湯婷婷; born October 27, 1940) is a Chinese American writer.
She was born as Maxine Ting Ting Hong to a laundry house owner in Stockton, California. She was the first of six children to be born in the United States. Her parents had two children before coming to this country. She is currently a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley where she graduated with a BA in English in 1962.
Her works often reflect on her cultural heritage and blend fiction with non-fiction. Among her works are The Woman Warrior (1976), awarded the National Book Critics Award for Nonfiction, and China Men (1980), given the same award. She has written one novel, Tripmaster Monkey, a story depicting a character based on the mythical Chinese character Sun Wu Kong. Her most recent books are To Be The Poet and The Fifth Book of Peace.
She was awarded the 1997 National Humanities Medal by President of the United States Bill Clinton. Kingston was a member of the committee to choose the design for the California commemorative quarter. She was arrested in March 2003 in Washington, D.C., for crossing a police line during a protest against the war in Iraq.
She married Earll Kingston in 1962. They live in Oakland and have one child, Joseph Lawrence Chung Mei, born in 1964.
Kingston was honored as a 175th Speaker Series writer at Emma Willard School in September 2005.
[edit] Selected works
- The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, Knopf distributed by Random House, 1976.
- China Men, Knopf, 1980.
- Through the Black Curtain, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1987.
- Hawai'i One Summer (essays), Meadow Press, San Francisco, 1987.
- Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (novel), Knopf, 1989.
- To Be the Poet (nonfiction), Harvard University Press, 2002.
- The Fifth Book of Peace (nonfiction), Brent, 2006
