Nancy Au

Writer, Artist, Educator, and Misfit

Nancy Au's full-length collection, Spider Love Song and Other Stories (September 2019, Acre Books), was a finalist for the 2020 CLMP Book Award for Fiction and the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award for Debut Short Fiction Collection, and listed among Entropy Magazine's Best Fiction of 2019. She won Redivider’s Blurred Genres Contest, The Vestal Review’s VERA Flash Fiction Prize, and her flash fiction is included in the Best Small Fictions anthology.

A little bit more about me: My short stories, flash fiction, creative nonfiction, interviews, and essays--which have appeared in close to forty literary journals and anthologies including Gulf Coast, Craft Literary, Catapult, Atticus Review--often center on the experiences of the elderly, the young, immigrants, and first-generation US born characters. I endeavor to write about (and to amplify, diversify, complicate) the voices that have been historically ignored (or stereotyped or diminished or demonized) within academia, literature, theater, film, television, and other media. I am particularly interested in exploring in my art, the lives of American-born Chinese and Chinese immigrants.

I graduated from U.C. Berkeley with a degree in sociocultural anthropology. I have an MFA from San Francisco State University. I co-founded The Escapery, a collective of artists dedicated to diversity, and to writing and art as a form of resistance. I was a submissions editor with the fabulous flash fiction journal, SmokeLong Quarterly. I am a mosaic artist who volunteered for years working with other artists to mosaic trash cans around Oakland. I am also a painter currently studying and working with traditional Chinese scroll painting techniques. I love how mathematics informs poetry, folktales inform anthropology, biology informs art, theater informs astronomy, physics informs flash fiction. I love how different professional and academic disciplines enrich one another in ways that often defy our expectations. In other words, I love words, I love language, I love science, I love to write, I love to teach, and I would love to hear from you! Thank you so much for visiting!

Banner photo: Nancy Au, St. Margaret's Bay, UK, 2018

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