UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Novelist and essayist Xu Xi will offer a reading at Penn State as part of this year’s Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. The reading, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 13, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium.
Xu is a former Indonesian national of Chinese descent from Hong Kong who became a U.S. national at the age of 33. An author of 15 books — five novels, nine collections of fiction and essays, and one memoir — she is considered one of Hong Kong’s leading writers in English. She also edited five anthologies of Asian and Hong Kong writing. Recent titles include “The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology” (Bloomsbury, 2021); “This Fish is Fowl: Essays of Being” (Nebraska 2019); “Insignificance: Hong Kong Stories” (Signal 8, 2018); “Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy for a City” (Penguin, 2017); and the novel “That Man in Our Lives” (C&R, 2016).
Xu’s latest new collection, “Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations” (Signal 8 Press), is scheduled to be released in November 2022. Writer Antony Dapiran characterizes the forthcoming collection as “‘speculations’ [that] weave between fact and fiction, from personal essay to short story, memoir to satire, as elusive and allusive as her playful, slippery sentences.”
About Xu’s most recent essay collection, “This Fish is Fowl,” writer Robin Hemley observes: “To read these smart, inventive, and always surprising essays is to be given a passport to a transnational perspective the world sorely needs at this moment. Xu Xi's sense of identity: Indonesian/Chinese/American/Hong Kong is not mixed up (though she likes to label herself a ‘mongrel’), but expansive. Identity for her has almost nothing to do with borders but with a kind of echolocation — sending forth her speculations on what it means to be a traveler, a daughter, a life partner, a woman in order to determine a shifting but remarkable path through geographies of being.”
Xu currently holds the William H.P. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross and is a founding partner of Authors at Large Inc. She previously co-directed the international master of fine arts in creative writing and literary translation in prose program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and she was writer-in-residence at City University of Hong Kong, where she established the first low-residency MFA in creative writing in Asia.
A diehard transnational, Xu long inhabited the flight path connecting New York, Hong Kong and the South Island of New Zealand. Prior to 1998, she had an 18-year corporate career in marketing and management and held positions at several multinationals in the U.S. and Asia, including The Asian Wall Street Journal, Leo Burnett Advertising, Federal Express, Pinkerton’s and Cathay Pacific Airways. She now splits her life between the state of New York and the rest of the world.
The Mary E. Rolling Reading Series is a program offered by Penn State’s Creative Writing Program in English. The series receives support from the College of the Liberal Arts, the Department of English, the Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Endowment, the Mary E. Rolling Lectureship in Creative Writing, and University Libraries. A full list of readings in the 2022-23 series, as well as links for livestreams and virtual readings, can be found at creativewriting.psu.edu.