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Vanessa Hua

Adjunct Professor

Part-Time Faculty
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Biography

Vanessa Hua is an award-winning columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and 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, and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, as well as awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association, among others. She has filed stories from China, Burma, South Korea, Panama, and Ecuador, and her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She has taught, most recently, at the Warren Wilson MFA Program and Sewanee Writers Conference. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.

Expertise

  • Fiction
  • Creative Nonfiction
  • Journalism

Education

  • UC Riverside, MFA in Creative Writing, 2009
  • Stanford University, MA in Media Studies, 1997
  • Stanford University, BA in English, 1996

Prior Experience

  • Adjunct Professor, Warren Wilson MFA Program in Writing
  • Columnist, San Francisco Chronicle
  • Freelance Journalist, Various publications

Awards & Distinctions

  • National Endowment of the Arts, 2020
  • Asian Pacific Islander Award for Literature, 2017
  • Rona Jaffe Writer Award, 2015

Selected Publications

  • Forbidden City, Ballantine
  • Deceit and Other Possibilities
  • A River of Stars, Ballantine