(Photo by Bruce Hemingway, courtesy of University of Washington). I was the keynote speaker for the 2020 Friends of UW Libraries Annual Lecture in January. I shared the publishing history of No-No Boy by John Okada it's importance as a part of Asian American literary history. Read an...
Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, Shawn Wong, and Chan’s daughter Jennifer, photographed near San Quentin State Prison, in Marin County. (Photograph by Ken Gaetjen). This article from The New Yorker talks about the 1974 publication of “Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers” edited...
I was recently interviewed by Bill Kenower for Author Magazine....
Thank you to my colleague, Vince Schleitwiler, for this excellent and humbling essay on my 50-year journey with John Okada's novel, No-No Boy, published in the UW Magazine. Also, thank you to the UW Alumni Association for selecting No-No Boy as its Alumni Book Club...
My "Aiiieeeee!" origin story is out online on the Asian American Writing website. Forty-five years later the new edition of the landmark anthology has been published by the University of Washington Press with a new Foreward by Tara Fickle. Read an excerpt: "Think about that for a...
Author Shawn Wong at his IBM typewriter in his San Francisco apartment in 1974. The images counterclockwise over his head are: a poster from the First Asian American Writers' Conference at the Oakland Museum, a snapshot of Shawn as a child wearing a sailor's outfit,...
The New York Times story by Thessaly La Force on the rediscovery of No-No Boy is online today. It tells the beginning of my almost 50 year journey with this novel. Read an excerpt: "Their correspondence with Tuttle, the book’s publisher, revealed that Okada had been working...
I'm mentioned in this New Yorker article in which "a literary critic and a psychotherapist study broken narratives and missing words to understand what a diverse cohort has in common." Read an excerpt: "In 1971, the writer Shawn Wong was browsing a used bookstore when he came...
Left to right: Frank Chin, Myself, and Ben Fee at the Oakland Museum during the 1975 Asian American Writers Conference, organized by CARP (Photo by Pok Chi Lau). Vince Schleitwiler asked prominent writers and scholars, myself included, to recommend our favorite overlooked pieces of Asian American...
Tracy Brown wrote an article for Tribune News Service concerning the controversy of Penguin Classics' publication of John Okada's "No-No Boy." Here's an excerpt: "Wong says the publication history behind 'No-No Boy' is an important part of Asian American history and that Penguin has disregarded that part...