Celebrating Lunar New Year with Maxine Hong Kingston and special guests!

We welcome back renowned Bay Area author Maxine Hong Kingston, along with new guests Kathryn Ma, Aimee Phan, and moderator Mina Kim, to commemorate Lunar New Year and the Year of the Snake. The panelists will share the traditional, contemporary, and uniquely personal rituals that make up their New Year celebrations, explore the myths and qualities associated with the Snake, and offer predictions for the year.

Co-sponsored by the Chinese Historical Society of America.

About the Panelists

Maxine Hong Kingston is the author of The Woman Warrior, China Men, and The Fifth Book of Peace, among other works. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald award. She was given the National Humanities Medal by President Clinton, and the National Medal of Arts by President Obama. She worked for many years as a senior lecturer in creative writing at UC Berkeley. Kingston lives in Oakland, California.

Mina Kim is host of the 10 a.m. statewide hour of KQED’s Forum; a live daily talk show for curious Californians on issues that matter to the state and nation, with a particular emphasis on race and equity. Before joining the Forum team, Mina was KQED’s evening news anchor, and health reporter for The California Report. Her award-winning work has included natural disasters in Napa and gun violence in Oakland. Mina grew up in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Kathryn Ma is the author of the novel The Chinese Groove, winner of the California Book Award Silver Medal for Fiction and the 2024 selection for One City One Book by the San Francisco Public Library. The Chinese Groove was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a People Magazine Best Book and a Washington Post Best Audiobook, and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, among other honors. Her work includes the novel The Year She Left Us, a NYT Editors’ Choice; the short story collection, All That Work and Still No Boys, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award; reviews and essays. Find out more at kathrynma.com.

Aimee Phan is the author of The Reeducation of Cherry Truong (St. Martin's Press, 2012) and We Should Never Meet: Stories (St. Martin's Press, 2004), which was named a Notable Book by the Kiriyama Prize in fiction, as well as a finalist for the 2005 Asian American Literary Awards. Her fiction has appeared in Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Chelsea, Prairie Schooner and Meridian. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, USA Today, Guernica and the Oregonian. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the MacDowell Colony and Hedgebrook.

Host or Publisher Mechanics' Institute