Maxine Hong Kingston (湯婷婷; born October 27, 1940) is a Chinese American writer.

She is the first of six children born to a laundry house owner in Stockton, California. 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 is married to Earll Kingston. They live in Oakland and have one child, Joseph Lawrence Chung Mei, born in 1964.

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), Knopf, 2003.

External links

• Reading at UC Berkeley, February 5, 2004 (video)
• Voices from the Gaps biography
• Literary Encyclopedia (in-progress)

1940 births | Living people | California writers | Chinese American writers | University of California, Berkeley faculty | Women writers

Maxine Hong Kingston