Vanessa Hua

Acclaimed Novelist
Award-winning Story Writer
Asian/Pacific American Award

Readings &
Lecture Topics
  • Writing Across Cultures
  • An Evening with Vanessa Hua

Biography

“Hua writes with sophistication and the punch of the immigrant experience, filled with nuance and fresh detail.” –LitHub

“Heart-wrenching, implacable. Hua draws the reader in with her power of perception.” –Huffington Post

 “Diverse, cosmopolitan.” –The Rumpus

Vanessa Hua is an award-winning author and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her short story collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities (2016), received an Asian/Pacific American Award in Literature, was a finalist for a California Book Award, and O, The Oprah Magazine called it a “searing debut.” She is also the author of A River of Stars (2018) a powerful novel about motherhood, immigration, and identity. She is also the author of the novel Forbidden City (2022).

For two decades, Hua has been writing about Asia and the diaspora, filing stories from China, Burma, Panama, South Korea, and Ecuador. She began her career at the Los Angeles Times before heading east to the Hartford Courant. Her stories have appeared in the New York Times, San Francisco Magazine, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Newsweek, among other publications.

A Bay Area native, she received a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan literary award, and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing.  She is a graduate of Stanford University and UC Riverside’s MFA program. Other achievements include the Dr. Suzanne Ahn Award for Civil Rights and Social Justice coverage; the Asian American Journalists Association’s National Journalism Award — online/broadcast, print, and radio; the Society of Professional Journalists, the James Madison Freedom of Information Award, the San Francisco Press Club Greater Bay Area Journalism Award, San Francisco Press Club, and Best of the West.

Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, ZYZZYVA,  Guernica, and elsewhere. She received an Emerging Writer Fellowship from Aspen Words,  a fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference,  and a writer’s residency at Hedgebrook, among other honors.  She is a contributing nonfiction editor AAWW’s The Margins, and she works and teaches at the Writers’ Grotto in San Francisco.  She teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Sewanee Writers Conference, and elsewhere.

Short Bio

Vanessa Hua is the author of Deceit and Other Possibilities (2016), winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and a finalist for the California Book Award, as well as A River of Stars (2018) and Forbidden City (2022). She has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, Dr. Suzanne Ahn Award for Civil Rights and Social Justice reporting as well as honors from the Society of Professional Journalists, Asian American Journalists’ Association, and Best of the West. A columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, she has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and ZYZZYVA, among others, and has filed stories from China, Burma, South Korea, and elsewhere. She teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Sewanee Writers Conference, and elsewhere.

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