Dave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He is best known for his 2000 memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. Eggers is also the founder of several notable literary and philanthropic ventures, including the literary journal Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the literacy project 826 Valencia, and the human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness. Additionally, he founded ScholarMatch, a program that connects donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in numerous prestigious publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine.
Heyday is an independent nonprofit publisher based in Berkeley, California.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim is an American writer of poetry, fiction, and criticism. She was both the first woman and the first Asian person to be awarded Commonwealth Poetry Prize for her first poetry collection, Crossing The Peninsula, which she published in 1980. In 1997, she received the American Book Award for her memoir, Among the White Moon Faces.
Karena Lam is a Taiwanese Canadian actress and singer based in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Monique T.D. Truong is a Vietnamese American writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from Yale University and Columbia University School of Law. She has written multiple books, and her first novel, The Book of Salt, was published by Houghton-Mifflin in 2003. It was a national bestseller, and was awarded the 2003 Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award. She has also written Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, along with Barbara Tran and Luu Truong Khoi, and numerous essays and works of short fiction.
Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms. Harjo is a citizen of the Muscogee Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA degree at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.
Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. Her short story collection Wednesday's Child was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
Mimi Pond is an American cartoonist, comics artist, illustrator, humorist, and writer.
Founded in 1921, English PEN is one of the world's first non-governmental organisations and among the first international bodies advocating for human rights. English PEN was the founding centre of PEN International, a worldwide writers' association with 145 centres in more than 100 countries. The President of English PEN is Margaret Busby, succeeding Philippe Sands in April 2023. The Director is Daniel Gorman. The Chair is Ruth Borthwick.
Lucia Maria Perillo was an American poet.
Voice of Witness is a non-profit organization that uses oral history to illuminate contemporary human rights crises in the U.S. and worldwide through an oral history book series and an education program. Voice of Witness publish books that present narratives from survivors of human rights crises including: exonerated men and women; residents of New Orleans before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina; undocumented workers in the United States; and persons abducted and displaced as a result of the civil war in southern Sudan. The Voice of Witness Education Program brings these stories, and the issues they reflect, into high schools and impacted communities through oral history-based curricula and holistic educator support.
PEN Center USA was a branch of PEN, an international literary and human rights organization. It was one of two PEN International Centers in the United States, the other being the PEN America in New York City. On March 1, 2018, PEN Center USA unified under the PEN America umbrella as the PEN America Los Angeles office. PEN Center USA was founded in 1943 and incorporated as a nonprofit association in 1981. Much of PEN Center USA's programming continues out of the PEN America Los Angeles office, including the Emerging Voices Fellowship, PEN In the Community writing residencies and guest speaker program, and the PEN Presents conversation series.
Cheuk Wan-chi, also known as Vincci, G and GC Goo-Bi, is a Hong Kong media personality, stand-up comedian, screenwriter and director, master of ceremonies, and an occasional television pundit and talk show host. She first came to prominence as a disk jockey and radio personality working for Hong Kong's Commercial Radio (CRHK).
Jennifer Wong is a writer and poet from Hong Kong.
Claire Vaye Watkins is an American author and academic.
Kaya Press is an independent non-profit publisher of writers of the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora. Founded in 1994 by the postmodern Korean writer Soo Kyung Kim, Kaya Press is housed in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
The Overstory is a novel by Richard Powers published in 2018 by W. W. Norton & Company. It is Powers' twelfth novel. The book is about nine Americans whose unique life experiences with trees bring them together to address the destruction of forests. Powers was inspired to write the work while teaching at Stanford University, after he encountered giant redwood trees for the first time.
Huang Qingyun, or Wong Hing-wan in Cantonese, was a Hong Kong-Chinese writer of children's literature and magazine publisher. She published the only Chinese-language children's magazine in China and Hong Kong during World War II, and later served as Vice President of the Guangdong Writers Association. Considered a pioneer of children's literature in Hong Kong, she received the Best Artist Award from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council in 2009.
Last of Her Name is a collection of stories by Mimi Lok, published by Kaya Press in October 2019. It won the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut short story collection and is the finalist for 2020 National Magazine Award, The California Independent Bookseller Alliance ‘Golden Poppy’ Book Awards 2020, and CLMP Firecracker Award.
Xuan Juliana Wang is a Chinese American writer. She teaches creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her 2019 short story collection, Home Remedies, won the John C. Zacharis First Book Award and was shortlisted for the Young Lions Fiction Award and the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. She earned her MFA from Columbia University and received a Stegner Fellowship to study at Stanford University.
