Former high school teacher Maxine Hong Kingston is well-known today as a talented author. Photo Credit: Library of America

Many people are familiar with the famous author Maxine Hong Kingston. She wrote The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, a critically-acclaimed autobiographical account. In the book, Maxine details the conflicting cultural messages she received as the daughter of Chinese immigrants growing up in America in the 1950s. She also wrote China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, The Fifth Book of Peace, and Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. But did you know that this talented writer is also a teacher?

Maxine was born on October 27, 1940, in Stockton, California. Her parents were first-generation Chinese immigrants. In order to immigrate to the United States, her father had to give up a career as a professional scholar and teacher in his home village of Sun Woi, near Canton. Maxine was the third of the couple’s eight children, and the eldest of the six children born to them in the United States.

Maxine earned her Bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962, and then obtained her teaching credential. She taught high school in the city of Hayward for a year, and then moved to Hawaii where she taught in various positions. From 1970 to 1977 she taught at Mid-Pacific Institute, a private boarding school. In 1990, she was invited to join the faculty of her alma mater, UC Berkeley, as a senior lecturer in the English department.

This remarkable educator has earned many awards. She garnered the Writers Award from the national Endowment for the Arts in 1980 and again in 1982. She was honored by President Bill Clinton with a National Humanities Medal in 1997. She has also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Asian American Literary Awards (2006), and a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation (2008). In 2013 this former English teacher was honored by President Barack Obama with a National Medal of Arts award.