| Shawn Hsu Wong | |
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Shawn Wong at the Miami Book Fair of 1990 |
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| Born | 1949 Oakland, California |
| Occupation | Writer, Editor, Professor |
| Notable work(s) | Aiiieeeee! |
Shawn Hsu Wong (born 1949 in Oakland, California) is an author and Professor of English and former Director of the University Honors Program (2003–06), Chair of the Department of English (1997–2002), and Director of the Creative Writing Program (1995–97) at the University of Washington where he has been on the faculty since 1984. He is Chinese American and a pioneer of Asian American studies. Wong received his undergraduate degree in English at the University of California at Berkeley (1971) and a Master's degree in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University (1974).
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Wong's first novel, "Homebase," published by Reed and Cannon (1979), won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and the 15th Annual Governor's Writers Day Award of Washington. His second novel, "American Knees," first published by Simon & Schuster in 1996, was adapted into an independent feature film entitled Americanese (2010), written and directed by Eric Byler and produced by Lisa Onodera. The book was also re-issued by University of Washington Press in 2005.
Wong explained in an interview the title "American Knees": "When I was a child, kids used to come up to me and ask, 'What are you: Chinese, Japanese or Americanese?", while some asked if I was "Chinese, Japanese or dirty knees?"
"I never really knew what that meant when I was a kid," Wong says, "but I knew I didn't like it."[1]
Wong is also co-editor of six multicultural literary anthologies including the pioneering anthology, Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (reprinted in four different editions), Literary Mosaic: Asian American and Asian Diasporas, Cultures, Identities, Representations, and The Big Aiiieeeee!. He is co-editor of Before Columbus Foundation Fiction/Poetry Anthology: Selections from the American Book Awards, 1980-1990 – two volumes of contemporary American multicultural poetry and fiction.
Wong has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Italy. He was featured in the 1997 PBS documentary, Shattering the Silences and in the Bill Moyers' PBS documentary, Becoming American: The Chinese Experience, in 2003. He is also featured in the 2005 documentary, What's Wrong With Frank Chin?.
Wong also serves as consulting and contributing editor for Transtext(e)s-Transcultures: A Journal of Global Cultural Studies, http://www.transtexts.net
Shawn Wong specializes in Creative Writing and Asian American studies. Since 1972, Wong has taught at several colleges and universities, including Mills College, University of California at Santa Cruz and San Francisco State University. He has also taught at the Universität Tübingen (Germany), Jean Moulin Université (Lyon), and at the University of Washington Rome Center (Italy).