Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen left Vietnam with his family in 1975. They first lived in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, where there was a camp for Vietnamese refugees. The family then moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania before settling permanently in San Jose, California in 1978, where they opened a Vietnamese grocery store. Nguyen recalls that his parents often worked twelve to fourteen hour days, in what was then a rough neighborhood. On one Christmas Eve, they were both shot in an armed robbery. Their efforts, however, secured Nguyen a preparatory school education. He attended St. Patrick School, a parochial elementary school, and Bellarmine College Preparatory, both of which are in San Jose. After graduation, he enrolled in and briefly attended both the University of California, Riverside and UCLA, before settling on the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned degrees in English and Ethnic Studies in 1992. He remained at Berkeley for his doctoral studies and earned a PhD in English in 1997. He then went on to a teaching career at the University of Southern California, where he is currently the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, as well as Professor in the Departments of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature. Nguyen’s first publication was a work of scholarship. Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America examines how Asian Americans have used literature as a political tool. The study spans one hundred years, from 1896 to 1996. Other non-fiction works include Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War and The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. In 2017, Nguyen published The Refugees, a short story collection. Additionally, he has published numerous essays and reviews and has edited an anthology on the emerging field of Transpacific Studies. The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016 and Nothing Ever Dies was a finalist for the National Book Award in Non-Fiction. In 2017, Nguyen became a MacArthur Fellow. Nguyen is married with a son.