Vanessa Hua’s debut collection of short stories, Deceit and Other Possibilities, was published late last month — just over a decade after Hua workshopped one of the volume’s stories at the conference.
Deceit and Other Possibilities won the Grand Prize for Prose in the Willow Books Literature Awards competition. O, The Oprah Magazine calls the collection a “searing debut.”
Of her experience in ZZ Packer’s workshop, Hua writes, “the conference fosters an amazing literary community, and I’m still in touch with classmates from our workshop. I deeply appreciate how my time at the conference shaped my development as a writer.”
Hua received a 2015 Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award and is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker online, Salon, San Francisco, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Newsweek, among other publications.
A Bay Area native, she received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan literary award and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing at San Jose State University. A graduate of Stanford University and UC Riverside’s MFA program, she works and teaches at the Writers’ Grotto in San Francisco. Hua is working on two novels, which are forthcoming from Ballantine.
Visit Guernica to read Hua’s 2014 story, “Amituofo,” and explore her work further on her Web site.
