Monique Truong

Born in Saigon, South Vietnam (now Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) in 1968, Monique Truong came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1975. She is based now in Brooklyn, New York. Her novels are the bestselling The Book of Salt (2003) and the award-winning Bitter in the Mouth (2010) and The Sweetest Fruits (Viking, 2019). Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, O magazine, Real Simple, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia, among others. Truong is also a lyricist and librettist, working in collaboration with composers Joan La Barbara and Shih-Hui Chen. Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship, Hodder Fellowship, she has taught fiction wring at Columbia School of the Arts, Princeton, and Baruch College as the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence. She received her BA in Literature from Yale University and her JD from Columbia Law School.