-Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston was raised in California’s Central Valley by her Chinese immigrant parents, whose family history she recounted in her groundbreaking multi-genre memoir The Woman Warrior (1976). The Chinese-American protagonist of her 1990 novel Tripmaster Monkey, Wittman Ah Sing, is named after Walt Whitman. Kingston admired what she called Whitman’s “vision of a new kind of human being that was going to be formed in this country—although he never specifically said Chinese . . . I’d like to think he meant all kinds of people.” In her turn to poetry with the 2012 book, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, Kingston has continued to engage with Whitman, writing, “I embed his words into mine so I can sing along with him.”