Monique Truong is a Vietnamese American novelist, essayist, and librettist. Her debut novel, The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), was a national bestseller, a New York Times Notable Fiction Book, a Chicago Tribune Favorite Fiction, a Miami Herald Top 10 Books, and winner of the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Awards/Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and Bard Fiction Prize, among others. She followed with two more award-winning novels, Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010) and The Sweetest Fruits (Viking, 2019), and all together her books have been translated into fourteen languages to date. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship, Princeton University’s Hodder Fellowship, John Gardner Fiction Book Award, and John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, among others. Truong serves on the Board of Directors of the Authors Registry, the Creative Advisory Council for Hedgebrook, and the Advisory Council for the Authors Guild. Previously (March 2011-March 2023), she served on the Authors Guild Council and was its vice president beginning in 2018. For PEN America, she was the Chair of the Literary Awards Committee (2014-2017) and a member of the Advisory Council. Born in Saigon, South Vietnam in 1968, Truong and her parents came to the U.S. as refugees in 1975. She grew up in North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas, and is based now in Brooklyn, New York. She received her B.A. from Yale University and J.D. from Columbia School of Law.