Alexander Kuo (born 1941? in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American teacher, poet, fiction writer, and essayist[1] of Chinese American ancestry. He received his B.A. from Knox College in 1961[2] where he studied with Sam Moon & Gogisi and M.F.A. from the University of Iowa where he studied with Donald Justice & Philip Roth. He is professor of English at Washington State University, which lists him as an example of their "world class faculty."[3] and is the former chair of the Department of Comparative American Cultures[4] (now called Comparative Ethnic Studies).[5] In 2001, WSU named him their first Writer-in-Residence.[6]
He has won multiple National Endowment for the Arts grants, and has held numerous teaching fellowships in China, including a 1989 fellowship at Beijing University, Senior Fulbright Scholar at Changchun University in 1991-92, and a Lingnan Fellow in Hong Kong in 1997-98. He has held positions at numerous universities in China including Peking University, Beijing Forestry University, Jilin University, and Hong Kong Baptist University. In 2002-03 he held the Writer-in-Residence position with Mercy Corps. He is Washington State University's first Writer-in-Residence. He received a Rockefeller Foundation grant for a Bellagio residency in 2003-4. Lipstick and Other Stories won the American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation in 2002.[7]
His writing makes demands on the reader in a way comparable to Franz Kafka or Jorge Luis Borges.[8]
He is a mentor to notable Native American writer Sherman Alexie.[9]
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