Deserved Honor

I’m delighted to hear, via the blog of the NBCC, that the National Book Foundation will honor Maxine Hong Kingston with its 2008 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. One of the books that has marked me most is Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (I first came across it as an undergraduate student at Mohammed-V). I still have my old copy, most of it underlined or filled with comments. And nowadays I even teach portions of it in my creative nonfiction classes. It’s so nice to see her work recognized.