Maxine Hong Kingston

Kingston grew up in Stockton, California, above her parents' laundry, the child of a father who had once been a scholar and calligrapher in China before immigrant labor reduced him to gambling-house and laundry work, and a mother trained as a doctor there who instead labored in laundries and fields in the United States. She studied at UC Berkeley and taught high school in Hawaii for years before The Woman Warrior appeared in 1976.

That book, blending her mother's 'talk-stories' with Chinese legend and her own girlhood memory, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and helped define a new Asian-American literary voice; China Men, its companion volume centered on the men of her family, won the National Book Award. She later taught for decades at UC Berkeley.

A practicing Buddhist and longtime peace activist, she has been arrested more than once at antiwar demonstrations in Washington, D.C.