XU XI 許素細 is author of fourteen books, most recently This Fish is Fowl: Essays of Being (Nebraska Univ. Press, 2019), Insignificance: Stories of Hong Kong (Signal 8 Press, 2018), a memoir Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy For A City (Penguin, 2017), the novel That Man In Our Lives (C&R Press, 2016). Forthcoming is The Art & Craft of Asian Stories (Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2020) which she is co-editing with Robin Hemley. Her editorial work includes four anthologies of Hong Kong writing in English. She holds a MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1985).
Awards include an O. Henry prize story, the Ploughshares Cohen award for short fiction, the South China Morning Post story contest prize, a NYFA fiction fellowship. Her novel Habit of a Foreign Sky was a finalist for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and her work has received international critical acclaim; her fiction collection Daughters of Hui was an Asiaweek 1996 top ten books of Asia, her novel The Unwalled City was HK Magazine’s pick for the top fifteen must-read books about the city of Hong Kong and her essay “The English of My Story” was selected for the notable essays & literary nonfiction list in TheBest American Essays of 2016. In 2001, The New York Times named her a “pioneering writer in English from Asia.”
Xu has taught at low-residency MFA programs in the U.S. and Asia for over 18 years. Prior to that, she had an 18-year career in international marketing & management, with positions at several major multinationals. She co-founded Authors at Large and is fiction editor-at-large for Tupelo Press, and she currently holds the Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. An Indonesian-Chinese-American diehard transnational, she previously inhabited the flight path connecting New York, Hong Kong and the South Island of New Zealand. These days, she splits her life, unevenly, between the state of New York and the rest of the world. . Follow her @xuxiwriter on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.
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