Maxine Hong Kingston will be presenting the Esther Freier Endowed Lecture in Literature 7:30 pm, September 30, in the Ted Mann Concert Hall.
The first child in her family born on United States soil to immigrant parents, Kingston was an engineering student at Cal Berkeley, and a former high school English teacher.
In the space of six years, she was feted and arrested at the White House (Clinton presented her with a National Humanities Medal; a 2003 Iraq War protest put her behind bars). Above all, she has been a writer creating indelible works, from that first groundbreaking melange of imagination and (self-)history, /The Woman Warrior/ (1976), to her striking account of life during wartime (her lifetime, from WWII to the Iraq War), /The Fifth Book of Peace/ (2003).
In the 33 years since Kingston began publishing, she has won the National Book Critics Circle Award (for /The Woman Warrior/), the National Book Award (for /China Men/), NEA Awards, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and, in 2008, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.
She has taught and mentored thousands of writers, from Hawaiian high school students and undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley, to the veterans she has met through writing-and-mediation workshops (and whose work she edited in the award-winning 2006 collection /Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace/).
The event is free, and no tickets are necessary.
