University of Idaho Visiting Writer: Alex Kuo

Alex Kuo will read at BookPeople as a Visiting Writer at the University of Idaho. Alex Kuo was born in Boston and lived his early childhood for most of the Second World War in the French Concession of occupied Shanghai. He is married to the writer Joan Burbick, and has lived and worded in the Pacific Northwest for most of his adult life, with extensive teaching appointments in Beijing, Changchun, and Hong Kong. He was awarded a United Nations research grant for his last novel The Man Who Damned the Yangtze partly set at China?s Three Gorges Dam. Since an MFA from the Iowa Writer?s Workshop in 1963, he has published more than 350 poems, stories, photographs, essays, and extended interviews in magazines, newspapers, and anthologies, as well as twelve other books. Among his many honors, he has received three National Endowment for the Arts awards, Fulbright and Lingnan Professorships, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio residency, Knox College?s Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award, and the American Book Award in 2002 for his Lipstick and Other Stories.