Keynote Speaker: Maxine Hong Kingston
is the award-winning author
of Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts.
The Humanities Division of Montgomery County Community College is pleased to announce that Maxine Hong Kingston will be the keynote speaker of the 2009 Writers Conference. She will discuss the creative process and her own enduring body of work in the keynote address. Kingston, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, is the author of The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, China Men, and The Fifth Book of Peace among others. Her work blurs the line between memoir and fiction by blending her Chinese heritage with questions of gender and racial equality. Kingston's Friday evening headlines the annual two-day conference, which includes workshops for working and aspiring writers, agent appointments, and more.
Maxine Hong Kingston was born in Stockton, California, in 1940. She received her B.A. in English and teaching certificate from the University of California at Berkeley. A varied teaching career financed her writing until 1976 when publishing her first book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, reflective of her own childhood as a Chinese American girl asserting the right to belong in America. The Woman Warrior became a bestseller and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best nonfiction book of 1976. Four years later, Kingston showed the patriarchal side of her heritage with the publication of China Men, also receiving a National Book Critics Circle Award. Kingston has published numerous other books, essays for popular and educational journals, and poetry.
