Monique Truong is a novelist, essayist, children’s book author, and librettist, whose debut novel The Book of Salt (2003) won numerous awards including a the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Awards/Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and the Bard Fiction Prize, among other honors. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, US-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship, American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fellowship, Princeton University’s Hodder Fellowship, John Gardner Fiction Book Award, and John Dos Passos Prize for Literature.