Maxine Hong Kingston | Author

Maxine Hong Kingston
Chinese-American novelist, nonfiction writer, academic, and activist

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New California Writing 2012 Launch Party: San Francisco

May.15.2012

New California Writing 2012 Launch Party: San Francisco

The second edition of New California Writing is here!

Join publisher Malcolm Margolin, series editor Gayle Wattawa, and selected contributors for an evening of readings, food, and celebration of our vibrant literary scene.

Oscar Villalon, managing editor at ZYZZYVA and former S.F. Chronicle book editor, will emcee!

Wednesday, May 16 from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.
California Historical Society
678 Mission St., San Francisco
Free!

Rapid-fire readings by Angie Chau, Camille Dungy, Lois Goodwill, Maxine Hong Kingston, Dean Rader, Daisy Uyeda Satoda, J. Tony Serra, Greg Sarris, Alexandra Teague, Stef Willen, and others.

About the book:

Once again, we’ve combed through a year’s worth of magazines, blogs, zines, and books, from both major and small publishers, to find the most compelling writing California has to offer. The...

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PUBLISHED: Jan.18.2011

I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

In her singular voice—humble, elegiac, practical—Maxine Hong Kingston sets out to reflect on aging as she turns sixty-five. Kingston's swift, effortlessly flowing verse lines feel instantly natural in this fresh approach to the art of memoir, as she circles from present to past and back, from lunch with a writer friend to the funeral of a Vietnam veteran, from her long...

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PUBLISHED: Sep.28.2006

Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace

This poignant collection, compiled from Kingston’s healing workshops, contains the distilled wisdom of survivors of five wars, including combatants, war widows, spouses, children, conscientious objectors, and veterans of domestic abuse. Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace includes accounts from people that grew up in military families, served as medics in the thick of war, or came...

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PUBLISHED: Sep.11.2007

The Writer's Brush (edited by Donald Friedman)

The itch to make dark marks on paper is shared by many writers and artists,” begins John Updike in his essay in The Writer’s Brush, and this stunning collection will amaze lovers of the literary and fine arts alike. Author Donald Friedman has gathered four hundred paintings, drawings, and scultpure—many from private collections, never before published—by more than two hundred of...

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PUBLISHED: Sep.01.2004

The Fifth Book of Peace

A long time ago in China, there existed three Books of Peace that proved so threatening to the reigning powers that they had them burned. Many years later Maxine Hong Kingston wrote a fourth Book of Peace, but it too was burned—in the catastrophic Oakland-Berkeley Hills fire of 1991, a fire that coincided with the death of her father. Now in this visionary and redemptive work,...

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PUBLISHED: Sep.16.2002

To Be the Poet

“I have almost finished my longbook,” Maxine Hong Kingston declares. “Let my life as Poet begin ... I won’t be a workhorse anymore; I’ll be a skylark.” To Be the Poet is Kingston’s manifesto, the avowal and declaration of a writer who has devoted a good part of her sixty years to writing prose, and who, over the course of this spirited and inspiring book, works out what the rest of...

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PUBLISHED: Dec.01.1998

Hawai'i One Summer

In this collection of eleven pieces, originally issued as a limited hand-printed edition, Maxine Hong Kingston does not attempt to capture Hawai’i but “instead and incidentally” to describe her “piece by piece, and hope that the sum praises her.” The essays provide readers with a generous sampling of Kingston’s signature: an angle of vision, exquisitely balanced and clear-sighted,...

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PUBLISHED: Aug.01.1998

Conversations With Maxine Hong Kingston (edited by Paul Skenazy)

In this collection of interviews, Kingston talks about her life, her writing, and her objectives. From the first, her books have hovered along the hazy line between fiction and nonfiction, memoir and imagination. As she answers her critics and readers, she both clarifies the differences and exults in the difficulties of distinguishing between the remembered and the re-created. She...

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PUBLISHED: Jun.19.1990

Tripmaster Monkey

Young Chinese American Wittman Ah Sing, a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and student of the 1960s, is an absolutely extraordinary fictional creation. He’s skinny, hip, six feet tall, an unstoppable playwright, a poet, a genius, and a nut. A fifth-generation Californian, he feels alien to both his Chinese heritage and the American culture that stereotypes...

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PUBLISHED: Apr.23.1989

China Men

The author chronicles the lives of three generations of Chinese men in America, woven from memory, myth and fact. Here’s a storyteller’s tale of what they endured in a strange new land.

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PUBLISHED: Apr.23.1989

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

The Woman Warrior is a pungent, bitter, but beautifully written memoir of growing up Chinese American in Stockton, California. Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men) distills the dire lessons of her mother’s mesmerizing “talk-story” tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upward. The author’s America is a...

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PUBLISHED:

The Face of Poetry (edited by Zack Rogow)

From the explosion in creative writing programs and workshops to the poetry slams and open mikes in every city to the reading groups venturing beyond prose for the first time, poetry is suddenly everywhere. This vibrant anthology showcases unforgettable poems and photographic portraits of leading writers in the United States, together with a CD that features many of the poets...

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Maxine's Latest Blogs

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Apr.25.2012 - 7:27 pm

Presenting at the Hawaii Book & Music Festival

Saturday, May 5, 11:00 am Presenting her book, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life Authors Pavilion Saturday, May 5, 1:00 pm Presenting with Phyllis Hoge on her upcoming book of...

Apr.09.2012 - 12:37 pm

For National Poetry Month, an Author Talk for San Joaquin Writers' Workshop

April 14th in Stockton...

Mar.30.2012 - 8:39 pm

The Grace Paley Memorial Reading

At the University of Massachusetts...

Mar.15.2012 - 4:50 pm

The Map in the Basement

We found the old torn-in-half map in the basement of the house we were living in after the Big Fire of 1991. The map starts with the Berkeley fire of 1923. The logo which...

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Sep.07.2003

Published by San Francisco Chronicle

As far back as her late 1980s television interview with Bill Moyers, Maxine Hong Kingston talked about reimagining the contents of ancient China’s three Books of Peace—...

Audio & Video

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Video: Lunch Poems: Maxine Hong Kingston

Video: On Artistic Idealism

Video: Reading and Q&A

About Maxine

Maxine Hong Kingston was born on October 27th, 1940, in Stockton, California. She was the first of six American-born children; her parents, Tom and Ying Lan Hong, had had two children in China before they came to America. Her mother trained as a midwife in To...

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Causes Maxine Kingston Supports

Amnesty International

Maxine Hong KingstonChinese-American novelist, nonfiction writer, academic, and activist

Latest News & Events

New California Writing 2012 Launch Party: San Francisco

Featured Works

Maxine's Latest Blogs

Published Reviews

Audio & Video

About Maxine

Causes Maxine Kingston Supports

Maxine Hong Kingston
Chinese-American novelist, nonfiction writer, academic, and activist