Deceit and Other Possibilities (Hua) - Author Bio

Author Bio
Vanessa Hua is an award-winning journalist and writer. Her short story collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities, received an Asian/Pacific American Award in Literature, was a finalist for a California Book Award, and O, The Oprah Magazine called it a "searing debut." Her novel, A River of Stars, is forthcoming in August, 2018.

She received a Rona Jaffe Writers' Award, and is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. For nearly two decades, she has been writing about Asia and the diaspora, filing stories from China, Burma, Panama, South Korea, Abu Dhabi, and Ecuador.

Hua began her career at the Los Angeles Times before heading east to the Hartford Courant. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, San Francisco Magazine, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Newsweek, among other publications.

A Bay Area native, she received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan literary award and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing at San Jose State University. A graduate of Stanford University and UC Riverside’s MFA program, she works and teaches at the Writers’ Grotto in San Francisco.

Achievements include the Dr. Suzanne Ahn Award for Civil Rights and Social Justice coverage; the Asian American Journalists Association’s National Journalism Award — online/broadcast, print, and radio; the Society of Professional Journalists,  the James Madison Freedom of Information Award, and the Best of the West. In 2017 she served as the Featured Literary Artist at APAture, an Asian American arts festival in San Francisco, and her short story collection is El Cerrito's pick for One City, One Book.

Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, ZYZZYVA,  Guernica, and elsewhere. She received an Emerging Writer Fellowship from Aspen Words,  a fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference,  and a writer's residency at Hedgebrook, among other honors. She is a contributing non-fiction editor at the Asian American Writers' Workshop's The Margins. (From the author's website.)