THE AUTHOR:
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Stay True won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir, as well as the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. The National Book Critics Circles writes that Hua has “crafted a transformative addition to the Asian American canon and to the critical conception of what a memoir is capable of.” Stay True is one of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of the Year, a New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year, a Publishers Weekly best nonfiction book of the year, and a New Yorker best book of the year. Ocean Vuong, New York Times bestselling author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, said that Stay True is “writing at its most open, meticulous, forgiving and tender—which is to say, this is writing at its best.” Hua pays tribute to his friend by bringing their shared memories to life, elevating the entire memoir genre “with a kind of athletic ease” (Vanity Fair).
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A staff writer at The New Yorker since 2017, and a contributor since 2014, Hua has covered a range of topics: from immigrant culture and student debt to hip-hop and affirmative action. In addition to Stay True, he is the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific. He currently teaches at Bard College and has previously taught at Harvard and Vassar College. Hua serves on the executive board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Critical Minded, an initiative to create opportunities for cultural critics of color, and was formerly a fellow at the New America Foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library.
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THE INTERVIEWER:
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Vanessa Hua is the author of the national bestsellers A River of Stars and Forbidden City, as well as Deceit and Other Possibilities, a New York Times Editors Pick. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has also received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, and a de Groot Foundation Writer of Note grant, as well as awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association, among others. A former longtime columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program, Sewanee Writers Conference, and elsewhere. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.