Celebrating Lunar New Year
with authors Maxine Hong Kingston, Aimee Phan, and more!

We welcome back renowned Bay Area author Maxine Hong Kingston, along with new guests Aimee Phan (and more to be announced!) to commemorate Lunar New Year and the Year of the Snake. The panelists will share the traditional, contemporary, and uniquely personal rituals that make up their New Year celebrations, explore the myths and qualities associated with the Snake, and offer predictions for the year.

Co-sponsored by the Chinese Historical Society of America.

Maxine Hong Kingston is the author of The Woman Warrior, China Men, and The Fifth Book of Peace, among other works. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald award. She was given the National Humanities Medal by President Clinton, and the National Medal of Arts by President Obama. She worked for many years as a senior lecturer in creative writing at UC Berkeley. Kingston lives in Oakland, California.

Aimee Phan is the author of The Reeducation of Cherry Truong (St. Martin's Press, 2012) and We Should Never Meet: Stories (St. Martin's Press, 2004), which was named a Notable Book by the Kiriyama Prize in fiction, as well as a finalist for the 2005 Asian American Literary Awards. Her fiction has appeared in Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Chelsea, Prairie Schooner and Meridian. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, USA Today, Guernica and the Oregonian. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the MacDowell Colony and Hedgebrook.