Monique Truong

A novelist, essayist, and librettist based in Brooklyn, Monique Truong was born in Saigon in 1968 and came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1975. Ms. Truong's novels include the national bestseller The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), the award-winning Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), and The Sweetest Fruits, forthcoming from Viking Books. Translated into thirteen languages, her novels have garnered an American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN America/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the Bard Fiction Prize, among others. Ms. Truong's essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Saveur, Food & Wine, Real Simple, Marie Claire, and upcoming May issue of O magazine. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship, and Princeton University's Hodder Fellowship, she was most recently the Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College (CUNY) in 2016. Ms. Truong is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia Law School. 

Also a member of PIVOT, Ms. Truong says, "For us refugees, who came to the U.S. seeking freedom, democracy, and a country governed by the rule of law, the current administration is a slap in the face. We cannot remain silent as this administration day by day, executive order by executive order, tweet by tweet dismantles the very foundation and values of our nation."