Xu Xi
Co-Founder, Authors at Large
Xu Xi 許素細 is the author of fifteen books of fiction & essays, including Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations (Signal 8 Press UK, 2022), This Fish is Fowl: Essays of Being (Nebraska, American Lives series 2019), Insignificance: Hong Kong Stories (Signal 8 Press, 2018), a memoir Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy For A City (Penguin 2017) and her fifth novel, That Man In Our Lives (C & R Press 2016). She is also editor or co-editor of five anthologies of Asian writing in English, including The Art & Craft of Asian Stories, co-authored with Robin Hemley (Bloomsbury, London 2021). She has been a finalist for the Man Asian Literary Prize, an O. Henry short story prize winner and a New York State Arts Foundation fiction fellow.
At home in both the U.S. and Asia (and for several years on New Zealand’s South Island as well), she currently holds the Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Previously, she was writer-in-residence at City University of Hong Kong (2010 to 2016) where she established and directed Asia's first low-residency MFA in writing. In 2018, she co-founded the world’s first low-residency International MFA in Writing and Literary Translation at Vermont College of Fine Arts where she was on the faculty at their MFA in Writing from 2002-12, and served as faculty chair from 2009-12. Other university residence positions include Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, Arizona State University; Distinguished Asian Writer at Philippines National Writing Workshops, Silliman University; Bedell Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa; Writer-in-Residence at Lingnan University, Hong Kong and she has taught writing & literature at universities or other institutions around the world, in Australia, China, Denmark, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Macau, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, Thailand. She is also fiction editor-at-large for Tupelo Press in the U.S., a contributing editor for the online journal Speculative Nonfiction, and on the editorial board of The Letters Page at the University of Nottingham in the U.K.
Prior to her full-time writing life, Xu had a parallel career in corporate marketing, mostly in the international arena. She worked in Asia and America for several major multinationals, and held management positions at Dow Jones (The Asian Wall Street Journal), Federal Express, Leo Burnett and Pinkerton’s. Other marketing positions she held were at Cathay Pacific Airways, the Wall Street law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy and PDT Architects in Cincinnati. In 1998, after the publication of her third book, she surrendered completely to the writing life.
Xu holds a MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.