• XU XI •
author - editor - writing coach

VOICE OF AMERICA

Xu Xi was featured on "Cultural Odyssey," a VOA television documentary broadcast in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong & Macau (Feb 14, 2003)

OTHER INTERVIEWS & FEATURES
Singapore Women's Weekly Sept 2002 "How To Think Like a Genius"
Pacific Reader Fall 2002 "Hong Kong Made Real"
Otago Daily Times July 25, 2002 "Seacliff retreat for author"
Singapore Business Times Jan 11, 2002 "An Insane Thing To Do but Xu Xi Did It"
South China Morning Post Mar 24, 2001 "Writing Off the Wall"
Hong Kong I-Mail Mar 17, 2001 "Superhero Powers the Pen"

XU XI is the author of seven books of fiction & essays, and editor of three anthologies of Hong Kong literature in English. A Chinese-Indonesian native of Hong Kong, the city was home until her mid-twenties, after which she led a peripatetic existence around Europe, America and Asia. She now inhabits the flight path connecting New York, Hong Kong and New Zealand.

THE NEW YORK TIMES named her a pioneer writer from Asia in English and the VOICE OF AMERICA featured her on their Chinese TV documentary series "Cultural Odyssey." Singapore’s BUSINESS TIMES dubs her passion "Asia as it is today – gritty, modern and confused." According to reviewers, her work explains "the paradox that is Hong Kong" that avoids "the sex and drug and triad stereotypes . . . portraying the city more accurately and realistically for it." Her "new and innovative diasporic global language" is "uncluttered" and "arrestingly poignant." She is "an alchemist of observation" whose sensibility is "generous and compassionate."

Awards include an O. Henry prize story, shortlist for the inaugural MAN Asian Literary Award, Cohen Award from PLOUGHSHARES for best story, a NYFA fiction fellowship, the South China Morning Post story contest winner, among others. She has also been writer-in-residence at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, Chateau de Lavigny in Switzerland, Kulturhuset USF in Norway, the Jack Kerouac Project of Orlando and the Anderson Center in Minnesota. SUNY Plattsburgh, where she earned her BA, accorded her their distinguished alumni award in 2004.

For eighteen years, the author had a second career in international marketing and management with various multinationals. In 1998, she finally surrendered completely to the writing life. She holds a MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and teaches on the MFA in writing prose faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier.

In 2009, she will be the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa's nonfiction program.