Alex Kuo



Alex Kuo

		the author The American writer Alex Kuo's widely-published poetry, fiction and non-fiction have ranged from articles on Hong Kong culture and economics, and fundamentalist Christians in China, to short stories about school children terrorizing Beijing's Bank of China, to a novel exploring Beijing's political spring of 1989. His most recent books are Chinese Opera, a novel, This Fierce Geography, poems, and Lipstick, short stories. Born in Boston, Alex Kuo was the first Chinese student to attend Hong Kong's KGV school, and has been teaching writing in the United States for most of the last forty years; he has lived in the Palouse region of northern Idaho and eastern Washington for the last two decades. He has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts grants, taught American literature at a Beijing university in 1989, and was the Senior Fulbright Scholar at a Changchun univeristy in 1991-2 and a Lingnan Fellow in Hong Kong in 1997-8.
		books Alex Kuo's work bridges oceans, cultures and generations. These stories in his new collection set in contemporary Beijing, play with and explode the intricate and often murky relationships between ideology, dissidence and just plain everyday survival. The title story "Lipstick" sets the tone. "I had great delight in reading this collection, which I think is the essence of what short stories should be: simple and at the same time profound and disturbing. It is strange that our experiences, in the antipods, are so basically similar. It is his genius to bring that to light, pointing out how the basic horror of repression, censorship and state terrorism is the same all over the world, on any side." Luisa Valenzuela.
		In Alex Kuo's latest novel, Chinese Opera, Sonny Ling and Sissy George are in Beijing. He's a hotshot pianist teaching at the Central Conservatory of Music. She's a gutsy nightclub singer. It's the political spring of 1989 but behind the walls of the Conservatory Madame Zhou rules. While their friends struggle to keep their humanity, Sonny and Sissy give the performances of their lives in a Chinese drama played out to the accompaniment of Bizet's Carmen. Read more about Chinese Opera, published by Asia2000 \| Read an excerpt This Fierce Geography is Alex Kuo's most recent volume of poetry, a handsome, hand-made book from Limberlost Press, one of the last letterpress publishers left. Other books are The Window Tree, New Letters from Hiroshima and Changing the River.
	links	An interview with Alex Kuo in the Bloomsbury Review Alex Kuo's page at Washington State University
	contact	E-mail Alex Kuo