Fiona Cheong

Fiona Cheong holds a BA in English and MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University. She is an Associate Professor of English and the author of two novels, The Scent of the Gods (W.W. Norton 1991), which was nominated for a National Book Award, and Shadow Theatre (Soho 2002), described in The Women’s Review of Books as a “lush, stylistically inventive novel” and “subtly subversive work.” Her shorter work is featured in Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Literature (ed. Jessica Hagedorn, Viking 1993) and Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing (ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Cheng-Lok Chua, New Rivers 2000). She has taught at Howard and Cornell Universities and at the Hurston-Wright Writers Workshop, and has been a judge for the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the Massachusetts Council for the Arts Awards. She has received numerous grants for her teaching and writing, including an Innovation in Education Award from the University of Pittsburgh’s Provost Office (2006), an artist’s fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts (2007) and a Make It Your Own Award from the Case Foundation (2008) for her civic engagement project, Re-Imagining Our City. She is a co-founder of the Asian American Writers Forum at the University of Pittsburgh and of its current manifestation, The Writers of Color Workshop. She is working on the final segment of her trilogy of novels set in Singapore, and on a book about teaching and writing.(from http://www.writing.pitt.edu/people/fa...)