Monique Truong
Harman Writer-In-Residence, Fall 2016
(Photo by Michele Panduri)
Monique Truong is a novelist and food essayist based in Brooklyn, New York. Her novels are The Book of Salt, a national bestseller, New York Times Notable Fiction book, and recipient of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award; Bitter in the Mouth, recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award; and the forthcoming The Sweetest Fruits. She was a 2015 U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellow, 2012 Visiting Writer at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 2010 Guggenheim Fellow, and 2007 Princeton University’s Hodder Fellow. Truong is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia Law School.
An excerpt from Bitter in The Mouth (2011)
“All families were an invention. Some families were machines. Some were gardens, full of topiaries or overgrown with milkweeds. Others were Trojan horses or other inspired works of art. Sinister or a thing of beauty, we often couldn’t tell because we were too close to them to see. We created them with our bodies or with our wills. We had children because they could be had. Biological or adopted, they were helpless and had little to say in how they would fit into the larger body. All children learned to adapt and thrive, or they died. Their first lessons of survival were learned within the home. Some children never grew up. Some hid within their own skin. Some shone like the sun or glowed cool like the moon. We added to our selves—we built our machines, tended to our gardens, created our objets d’art—because we desired, above all things, to outlive our bodies.”
Tuesday, October 18, 2016, 5:45 pm:
A reading and conversation with Monique Truong in the Asriel and Marie Rackow Conference Room, Room 750, Information and Technology Building, Baruch College.
Current Harman Director Prof. Bridgett Davis, Monique Truong, and former Harman Director Roslyn Bernstein.
A packed house with over a hundred people in attendance to hear Monique Truong speak.
Monique with students from her class.
*Photo credits: Glenda Hydler.