Aimee Phan is a

Vietnamese-American Vietnamese Americans ( vi, Người Mỹ gốc Việt, lit=Viet-origin American people) are Americans of Vietnamese ancestry. They make up about half of all overseas Vietnamese and are the fourth-largest Asian American ethnic group after Chinese ...

author. She was born and raised in

Orange County, California Orange County is located in the Los Angeles metropolitan area in Southern California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 3,186,989, making it the third-most-populous county in California, the sixth-most-populous in the United States, a ...

. She received her BA in English from UCLA and her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she won a Maytag Fellowship. Her first novel, ''We Should Never Meet'', was named a Notable Book by the

Kiriyama Prize The Kiriyama Prize was an international literary award awarded to books about the Pacific Rim and South Asia. Its goal was to encourage greater understanding among the peoples and nations of the region. Established in 1996, the prize was last awar ...

in fiction and a finalist for the 2005

Asian American Literary Awards The Asian American Literary Awards are a set of annual awards that have been presented by The Asian American Writers' Workshop since 1998. The awards include a set of honors for excellence in fiction, poetry and nonfiction, chosen by a panel of l ...

. Her writing has appeared in ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'', ''

Virginia Quarterly Review The ''Virginia Quarterly Review'' is a quarterly literary magazine that was established in 1925 by James Southall Wilson, at the request of University of Virginia president E. A. Alderman. This ''"National Journal of Literature and Discussion"'' ...

'', ''

USA Today ''USA Today'' (stylized in all uppercase) is an American daily middle-market newspaper and news broadcasting company. Founded by Al Neuharth on September 15, 1982, the newspaper operates from Gannett's corporate headquarters in Tysons, Virgini ...

'' and ''

The Oregonian ''The Oregonian'' is a daily newspaper based in Portland, Oregon, United States, owned by Advance Publications. It is the oldest continuously published newspaper on the U.S. west coast, founded as a weekly by Thomas J. Dryer on December 4, 185 ...

'' among other publications. She has received residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center. She worked as an assistant professor in English at

Washington State University Washington State University (Washington State, WSU, or informally Wazzu) is a public land-grant research university with its flagship, and oldest, campus in Pullman, Washington. Founded in 1890, WSU is also one of the oldest land-grant unive ...

from fall 2005 to summer 2007, and now teaches as an associate professor in writing and literature at the

California College of the Arts California College of the Arts (CCA) is a private art school in San Francisco, California. It was founded in Berkeley, California in 1907 and moved to a historic estate in Oakland, California in 1922. In 1996 it opened a second campus in San ...

in San Francisco, California and resides in Berkeley, California with her husband and two kids.

Selected works

;Books *
We Should Never Meet: Stories
' *

' ;Essays
Why Mainstream Critics Fail Writers of Color
in Salon
The Price of Urban Family Living
in The New York Times' The Motherlode
Housed
in Guernica
The Disciples of Memory
in The Rumpus

in The New York Times

Awards and honors

* 2004 Association of Asian American Studies Book Award * Finalist for the 2005 Asian American Literary Awards in Fiction * 2005 Kiriyama Prize Notable Book * 2010 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship * 2014 Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency

Reviews

* Carmela Ciuraru, September 29, 2004
We Should Never Meet by Aimee Phan
The Los Angeles Times * Anhoni Patel, September 19, 2004
We Should Never Meet by Aimee Phan
San Francisco Chronicle * Jee Yoon Lee, May 10, 201
The Reeducation of Cherry Truong by Aimee Phan
in Hyphen Magazine * Susan M. Lee, March 8, 201
The Reeducation of Cherry Truong by Aimee Phan
in In the Fray Magazine

External links

Official website

Someone You’d Love to Meet
{{DEFAULTSORT:Phan, Aimee Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Iowa Writers' Workshop alumni American writers of Vietnamese descent American women novelists 21st-century American novelists Writers from California 21st-century American women writers Vietnamese writers Vietnamese women writers English-language literature of Vietnam