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Maxine Hong Kingston to read from new work

Noted Chinese-American writer Maxine Hong Kingston, internationally recognized for her novels which interweave Chinese-American history, legends and personal struggles, will read from her work in progress, Fifth Book of Peace, on Monday, Oct. 7 at 7pm in Rm 10-250.

Her previous works include Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), which won the 1989 PEN fiction award; China Men (1980), which received a National Book Award and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; and The Woman Warrior (1976), winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award.

When Bill Moyers featured Ms. Kingston on the PBS program, A World of Ideas, he stated that her books are currently "the most widely taught on any American campus, more than any other American author."

"Sinologists have criticized me for not knowing myths and for distorting them; pirates correct my myths, revising them to make them conform to some traditional Chinese version," Ms. Kingston wrote in a personal statement for Approaches to Teaching Kingston's The Woman Warrior. "They don't understand that myths have to change, be useful or be forgotten. The myths I write are new, American."

While at MIT, Ms. Kingston, who is on sabbatical from the English department at the University of California at Berkeley, will discuss her novels and the recent stage adaptation of The Woman Warrior with Professor Helen Elaine Lee's Women Studies' class, Writing by American Women of Color, and Professor Laura Harrington's theater arts class, Playwriting I.

For more information on the program, which is co-sponsored by the MIT Program in Women's Studies and the Office of the Arts, call x3-8844.

A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on October 2, 1996.

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