Prose and Poetry

Chair: Russell Leong (rleong@ucla.edu)
Committee members: Brian Ascalon Roley, Ruth Hsu

Winner:

Book of Salt by Monique Truong

Monique Truong's Book of Salt tells the story of exile and discovery from the perspective of Binh, a Vietnamese cook in the household of Gertrude Stein and Alicew B. Toklas, fabled Americans writers in Paris. As sea water evaporates revealing sea salt that is used in French cooking, this novel slowly reveals, through Truong's mastery of language, time, and place, the exile's predicament of being the other, both a part of and apart of the new world he inhabits. A gem of a novel, it provides new diction and discovery for Asian American literature. Food, sexuality, and exile are not new in Asian American literature, but in Truong's hands these tropes become reborn, once again.

Truong graduated from Columbia University School of Law, and Yale University. She is an academic, and advocate, and an artist according to the Vietnamese American Studies Center at San Francisco State. She received a Lannan Foundation Writing Fellowship in 2001 and lives in Brooklyn, New York.