Monique Truong

Born in Saigon, South Vietnam, Monique Truong came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1975. She is a writer based now in Brooklyn, New York. Her award-winning novels are The Sweetest Fruits (Viking Books, 2019), Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), and the national bestseller The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). She is the co-editor of Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, 25th Anniversary Edition (DVAN Series, Texas Tech University Press, 2023). With fashion designer Thai Nguyen and New York Times bestselling illustrator Dung Ho, Truong is the co-author of Mai's Áo Dài, a children's picture book (Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, 2025). A Guggenheim Fellow, U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellow in Tokyo, Visiting Writer at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Princeton University’s Hodder Fellow, Kirk Writer-in-Residence at Ages Scott College, Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College (CUNY), and Frank B. Hanes Writer-in-Residence at UNC-Chapel Hill, Truong was most recently awarded a John Gardner Fiction Book Award and a John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. Truong received her BA in Literature from Yale and her JD from Columbia Law School.