Angie Chuang
Denver, CO
Writing
Angie Chuang is an award-winning author, former newspaper journalist, and tenured university professor living in Denver, Colorado. Her writing has appeared in her memoir, The Four Words for Home (Aquarius Press/Willow Books 2014); seven major daily newspapers; twenty-one general-interest and literary magazines; and nine anthologies. As an academic, she is a frequently cited expert source on race and immigration issues, appearing in The Washington Post, USA TODAY, The New Republic, Huffington Post, and MundoFox. She has also been invited as a speaker and reader to many conferences, including Association of Writers & Writing Programs, Fall for the Book (George Mason University), Baltimore Writer’s Conference, St. Mary’s College of Maryland Voices Series, Tucson Book Festival, and Busboys & Poets’ A Continuing Talk on Race series.
Her first book, The Four Words for Home, grew from a post-9/11 newspaper reporting assignment to “find the human face of the country we’re about to bomb.” The memoir weaves together the story of an Afghan immigrant family whom she followed to their homeland, and her own immigrant family’s story from Taiwan. The book was published March 2014 as the winner of the 2013 Willow Books Literature Awards Grand Prize in Prose. The book was positively reviewed by publications such as The Rumpus, The Women’s Review of Books, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. It was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize, the International Rubery Award, and the Eric Hoffer Award, and won the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Award Bronze Medal in Multicultural Nonfiction. In manuscript form, The Four Words for Home won second place in the 2011 Santa Fe Literary Project Awards, and was shortlisted for the 2012 Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference Bakeless Prize. The late NPR book critic Alan Cheuse said of The Four Words for Home, “If you are serious about reading news about kinship, the rigors of family, the by-blows of war, the way to making peace piece-meal (the only way for most of us), this is a book you need.”
Chuang’s literary essays have been published in Creative Nonfiction, Litro, The Asian American Literary Review, Vela, three editions of The Best Women’s Travel Writing and one of The Best Travel Writing, Tales from Nowhere (Lonely Planet), The Washington Post, The Washingtonian, Hyphen, The Root, New America Media, and other venues. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Corporation of Yaddo, Hedgebrook Writers in Residence, The Studios of Key West, Jentel Artist Residency, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale Foundation, PLAYA, Hambidge Center, Caldera Artist Residency, Soapstone, and Oregon Literary Arts.
She was a newspaper reporter for thirteen years, developing one of the first regional newspaper race and ethnicity issues beats for The Oregonian. As part of her reporting on American refugee and immigrant communities, she traveled to Afghanistan, Vietnam, and the post-Katrina Gulf Coast for stories. Her reporting received national and regional awards, including honors from the Columbia Journalism School Workshop on Journalism, Race and Ethnicity; the Society of Professional Journalists; the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Association; and the Society of American Travel Writers. She has also been a staff writer at The Hartford Courant and the Los Angeles Times.
She is now an associate professor of journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder, and before that spent a decade as an assistant and associate professor at American University School of Communication in Washington, D.C. She has published articles in top-ranked scholarly journals on the theme of American Otherness. Chuang is the daughter of Chinese American immigrants from Taiwan, and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her B.A. and M.A. in English literature at Stanford University, with honors and Phi Beta Kappa.