February 22, 2005
Award-winning Chinese-American novelist to speak at Literary Awards
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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – National Book Award winner Maxine Hong Kingston will speak April 20 at Purdue University's 74th Literary Awards celebration.
A public reading by the Chinese-American memoirist and novelist will be at 8 p.m. in Stewart Center's Fowler Hall. The reading is free and open to the public.
Kingston also will speak about the creative writing process during a banquet in the Purdue Memorial Union's North Ballroom to honor winners of the 73 prizes given in the Literary Awards Competition to undergraduate and graduate students at Purdue and to high school students from across Indiana. The prizes are worth $14,000 total. Banquet tickets, which are $15 for students and $21 for adults, can be purchased in Heavilon Hall, Room 324, or by calling the English department at (765) 494-3740. Ticket price includes dinner, the awards ceremony and Kingston's talk.
"Maxine Hong Kingston is best known for her two memoirs 'The Woman Warrior' and 'China Men,'" said Donald Platt, associate professor of English and Literary Awards committee chair. "Both of these works combine Chinese myths, the stories of her family members and the experience of Chinese immigrants in the United States to create her own version of 'talk-stories,' narratives transmitted and passed down orally from one generation to another. Her work has been credited with creating a new space in our literature for the voices of a generation of Asian-American writers."
Kingston, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, has published six books. Her first novel, "Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book," focuses on the character of Wittman Ah Sing, a Chinese-American playwright in San Francisco during the 1960s.
"His punning name suggests that her project is a kind of rewriting of Whitman and even Langston Hughes, who claimed that 'I, too, sing America,'" Platt said.
Kingston's "The Fifth Book of Peace" blends the genres of novel and memoir in a work that was born from the ashes of fire that swept through the Berkeley-Oakland Hills area where she lived, destroying a completed draft of a novel. She rewrote the destroyed novel, renamed it "Water," and added three other sections – "Fire," "Paper" and "Earth" – that chronicle, and respond to, that experience, Platt said.
She also has published "To Be the Poet," a collection of lectures she gave on poetry at Harvard, and "Hawai'i One Summer," a collection of essays on her longtime home.
Kingston was born in 1940 in Stockton, Calif., to Chinese immigrants Tom Hong and Chew Ying Lan. Her father, a teacher and scholar from the province of Canton, opened a laundry to support the family. Her mother, who trained to be a doctor in China, became a domestic and factory worker in this country. Kingston was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, from which she graduated in 1962. She has lived in Hawaii and California and has taught English at all levels from elementary school to college.
She is currently a senior lecturer in creative writing at University of California at Berkeley. She received the Anisfield-Wolf Race Relations Award in 1978, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992, was presented with a National Humanities Medal by President William Clinton in 1997, and has been awarded many honorary doctoral degrees. During the Vietnam years, she and her husband, Earll Kingston, sheltered and aided AWOL (absent without leave) soldiers. From the 1990s to the present, Kingston has run community-in-writing workshops for Vietnam veterans. She has participated in peace demonstrations and was arrested in 2003 for protesting against the war in Iraq in front of the White House.
Last year's Literary Awards program featured Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Wright. Since 1928 the English department has brought many writers to campus, including Tennessee Williams, John Irving and Louise Erdrich, to speak at the awards banquet.
Kingston's visit is sponsored by the Department of English and Purdue Libraries.
Writer: Amy Patterson-Neubert, (765) 494-9723, apatterson@purdue.edu
Sources: Donald Platt, (765) 494-3727, dplatt@cla.purdue.edu
Dorsey Armstrong, assistant professor of English and Literary Awards committee member, (765) 494-8576, darmstrong@cla.purdue.edu
Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu
Note to Journalists: The name of the author's husband is Earll, spelled with two "l"s.
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