The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

Vintage International Editio

Reading: Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston discusses and reads excerpts from her new book, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, written entirely in verse form. The book is a memoir of Kingston’s life, featuring reflections upon turning 65. Excerpts she reads from I Love a Broad Margin to My Life include the book’s beginning, a portion from seven days before her 65th birthday, from a peace march, about the end of her mother’s life, and the last lines from the book. Kingston also mentions that her new book gave her the opportunity to finish some stories from books she’d written previously, including “No Name Woman” from The Woman Warrior. She reads the excerpts from I Love a Broad Margin to My Life that finishes the story. Kingston also discusses the writing processes for her books Tripmaster Monkey, The Woman Warrior, and I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, which she explains the plot structure for, as well. In a question and answer session after the reading, Kingston talks about the influence of other writers, including Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, on her work. Additionally, she discusses the inspiration behind her book Hawai’i One Summer. Introduced by J. Colleen Berry

John Fowles Literary Forum: Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston is a Chinese American author and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated with a BA in English in 1962. Kingston has written three novels and several works of non-fiction about the experiences of Chinese immigrants living in the United States. Kingston’s writing is often cited for its melodiousness and poetry – its exploration of myth, legend, history and autobiography that combines to create a genre all to its own. She caught the world’s attention with her 1976 book “The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among the Ghosts,” an artful blend of memoir and myth about growing up in two worlds as a first-generation Chinese-American in Stockton, Calif. In this lecture, Kingston reads excerpts from her book and discusses her famous creative non-fiction, about Hua Mulan, the woman warrior. Kingston has received several awards for her contributions to Chinese American Literature including the National Book Award in 1981

Maxine Hong Kingston, 9th Annual ODU Literary Festival

Maxine Hong Kingston won the highly coveted National Book Critic Circle Award for her first book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Of her work Publisher\u27s Weekly has said, Immersed in the myths, legends and superstitions of her ancestors, Kingston has a magical facility for conveying an exotic culture and its people in precise, stunning detail. Seldom are we able to step with such ease into a culture so different from ours, and to emerge with a sympathetic understanding, tinged with awe and respect for the mysterious power of an ancient civilization. A Book of the Month Club main selection, Kingston\u27s second book, China Men, was excerpted in The New Yorker, Redbook, and The American Poetry Review. Ms. Kingston will open the Literary Festival with her reading Monday night at 8 p.m. She will speak on nonfiction writing on Tuesday at 12:30 p.m

Writing tricksters: mythic gambols in American ethnic literature

Writing Tricksters examines the remarkable resurgence of tricksters - ubiquitous shape-shifters who dwell on borders, at crossroads, and between worlds - on the contemporary cultural and literary scene. Depicting a chaotic, multilingual world of colliding and overlapping cultures, many of America's most successful and important women writers are writing tricksters. Taking up works by Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, and Toni Morrison, Jeanne Rosier Smith accessibly weaves together current critical discourses on marginality, ethnicity, feminism, and folklore, illuminating a "trickster aesthetic" central to non-Western storytelling traditions and powerfully informing American literature today