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Maxine Hong Kingston is a highly acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction and one of the first Asian Americans to make it to the top of the literary world in America …

The Kachemak Bay Campus of Kenai Peninsula College/UAA will present the statewide Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference in Homer June 18-22, 2004, announces Carol Swartz.

The conference will feature award-winning author Maxine Hong Kingston as the keynote presenter, as well as 20 other faculty including noted authors, editors and publishers from throughout the United States.

Maxine Hong Kingston is a highly acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction and one of the first Asian Americans to make it to the top of the literary world in America. Her first book, a memoir published in 1976 called The Women Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award and made her a literary celebrity. Kingston has since written two other critically hailed books. China Men, a sequel to The Women Warrior, was published in 1980 and received the National Book Award and was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize; and in 1989 Kingston published her first novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His FakeBook which won the PEN Fiction Award. Kingston has also written Hawai’i One Summer and helped edit the book Literature of California.

Born in Stockton in California’s San Joaquin Valley, Kingston graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1962 and returned a year later for a teaching certificate. In the early 1980’s she received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has been honored with the American Academy and Institute Award in Literature, California Governor’s Award in the Arts, Hawaii Award for Literature, California Arts Commission Award and the Anisfield Wolf Book Award. Kingston was recognized as a “Living Treasure of Hawaii” in 1980.

Kingston’s writing is often cited for its melodiousness and poetry – its exploration of myth, legend, history and autobiography combines to create a genre all to its own. Fearlessly creative and relentlessly brilliant, Kingston brings us into worlds where imagination and reality collide, and truth is revealed.

Kingston was awarded the National Humanities Medal from President Clinton. She currently lives in California where she teaches at her alma matter, University of California Berkeley.

Other out-of-state presenters include highly acclaimed authors and poets Robert Michael Pyle, Susan Power, John Keeble, Lee Gutkind, David Bradley and Arthur Sze.
Held at Land’s End Resort, the conference will offer daily workshops, craft talks, manuscript reviews, publisher conferences, panel presentations and evening readings in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and more.

Evening readings by conference faculty will be open to the general public at no charge.

Advanced registration is required; $225 before May 17th; $275 after May 15; University of Alaska admitted degree student rate: $125 before May 17th. One UAA academic credit is optionally offered for additional tuition of $102. For specific program and registration information, see http://chinook.kpc.alaska.edu/~conference/

The conference’s major benefactors are the Alaska State Council on the Arts, Anchorage Daily News, ConocoPhillips Alaska, and the Kachemak Bay Campus Caroline Coons Writers’ Endowment. Sponsors include Alaska Airlines, Cook Inlet Book Co., Era Aviation, First National Bank Alaska, Land’s End Resort, and The Homer Foundation. Conference supporters include Homer Council on the Arts, Old Town B&B, the Homer Bookstore, The Homer News, Tom Bodett & Co., Alaska Women’s Press Club and UAA.