Celeste Ng

Celeste Ng is the daughter of Chinese immigrants who migrated to the United States in the late 1960s. Her father worked as a physicist for NASA, while her mother taught chemistry at Cleveland State University. Ng graduated from Shaker Heights High School in Ohio, and went on to study English at Harvard before earning her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Michigan. In 2012, Ng won the Pushcart Prize for her short story “Girls, At Play.” In 2014, she published her debut novel entitled Everything I Never Told You, a literary thriller about family, racism, and secrets. It has since been translated into over 30 languages, and it won the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the ALA’s Alex Award. Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere (2017)—which follows two families in 1990s Shaker Heights as they challenge their neighborhood’s culture—was adapted for a television miniseries. Ng has taught writing at the University of Michigan and served as an editor for the Fiction Writers Review. In recent years, she has been a vocal advocate for the children of undocumented immigrants who have been separated from their families. Among other honors, Ng is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim fellowship. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her family.