Washington State University’s first writer-in-residence, Alex Kuo, who is also interim chair of the comparative American cultures program and a faculty member of the English department, will receive an American Book Award on May 3 in New York City for his most recent work “Lipstick and Other Stories.”
He discovered a love for writing in a creative writing course while a sophomore studying math and biology at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. That year changed the direction of his life and career. He went on to be one of the first undergraduates in his college to obtain a creative writing degree, in what was also one of the first creative writing programs in the country.
After his undergraduate work, Kuo enrolled in the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop, which, he says, boasts alumni who have won three Nobel Prizes, 10 Pulitzer Prizes, 10 American Book Awards and more.
Kuo began writing plays, then poetry, followed by fiction. “Lipstick and Other Stories,” for which he won the American Book Award, is a collection of short stories, written over the last 10 years, that draw upon his experiences as a young child in World War II China, as well as in later life.
The current issue of the “Bloomsbury Review,” a leading American literary paper, said of Kuo, that he “not only expects intelligence on the part of his readers, he demands it. One has to be constantly alert while reading his new collection of stories.
“With the veils of humor, personal quests, irony, and other devices lifted, one gets to the … center of Alex Kuo’s fiction. It’s a considerable climb but is well worth the trip,” the Review commented.
Kuo hopes the award will help launch his latest novel, “The Man Who Dammed the Yangtze.”
“As a Research One Institution, (WSU) needs to value its musicians, theatre magicians and writers as much as the scientists,” Kuo declares. “The artists are the lifeblood of the community.”
Kuo was surprised to be nominated, and then win the award, because he has avoided the professional associations and networking our culture expects. “Honest writers don’t network,” said Kuo. “The award means my work speaks for itself.”
“My getting the award is a message for the arts on this campus,” said Kuo, “It’s a sign that WSU is going to do something substantive in support of the arts.”
When not writing, teaching, or administrating, Kuo can be found playing “high level competitive bridge” — so high a level that his team has qualified in the past to represent the U.S. in international competition.
Some of his other achievements include a National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship, grants from the United Nations and the Idaho Commission for the Arts for research on “The Man Who Dammed the Yangtze,” teaching a year in China as a senior Fulbright scholar and in Hong Kong as the Lingnan visiting scholar in American studies.
