A Broad Margin to My Life: Maxine Hong Kingston

Recipient of the National Book Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, author of the renowned 1976 work The Woman Warrior, and the daughter of illegal Chinese immigrants, Maxine Hong Kingston discusses the real-life politics of genre — how protecting her parents and family meant designating their personal histories as fiction.

In addition, Kingston presents a reading and talk on Monday, April 20, at 6:15pm at Columbia University. Visit heymancenter.org/events for more information.

Maxine Hong Kingston‘s most recent book, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life (2011), a memoir-in-verse. Her other works include, The Fifth Book of Peace (2004), To Be the Poet (2002), China Men (1980) which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and The Woman Warrior (1976), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the recipient of the National Humanities Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award. She is Senior Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley and lives in Oakland.

Both programs cosponsored by the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University Writing Lives Series and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race’s Artist at the Center Series.

Part of Other Impulses: Poets Writing Across Genres