Mimi Lok

Mimi Lok is the author of LAST OF HER NAME, winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and a California Book Award silver medal. Her novella “The Woman in the Closet” was a finalist for the National Magazine Award and the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Electric Literature, Lucky Peach, Hyphen, and the South China Morning Post, among other publications. She has received residency fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Ucross, and Storyknife.

For nearly fifteen years, Lok served as founding executive director and executive editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human rights and oral history nonprofit, and received a Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for Social Progress in recognition of that work. Born and raised in the UK, she lived and worked in Hong Kong as a visual artist, writer, and educator. Her teaching draws on oral history and social justice practices, emphasizing inclusion, individual agency, and collective care.

• Short fiction
• Long fiction
• Creative nonfiction

• Narrative change
• Gender and identity in Chinese medieval history
• Decolonizing writing

• SF State, MFA Fiction, 2007

• Principal, Mimi Lok Consulting (2024-Present)
• Founder, Justice Storytellers (2024-Present)
• Executive Director, Voice of Witness (2008-2023)

• PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, 2020
• California Book Award, silver medal, 2020
• Northern California Book Award, finalist, 2020
• National Magazine Award, finalist, 2020
• Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for Social Progress, 2013

• "The Woman Wong" The Virginia Quarterly Review (2025)
• "In Search of Wholeness with BTS and Jung" The Believer Magazine (2023)
• "The Woman in the Closet," McSweeney's Quarterly (Kaya 2020)
• LAST OF HER NAME: Stories and a Novella (Kaya, 2019)