Shorter version
Grace Talusan is the author of The Body Papers, which won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction. She teaches writing at Brown University and is on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.
Longer version
Grace Talusan is an Assistant Teaching Professor of English in the Nonfiction Writing Program in the Department of English at Brown University. Her memoir, The Body Papers, won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction. Her second book, The King Died of Grief, is forthcoming with Restless Books. She is on the Board of Directors for the National Book Critics Circle and chairs the award committee for autobiography and memoir.
She earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, in the fiction writing program and taught at the University of Oregon, Tufts University, and Brandeis University, where she was the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence. Talusan has published creative nonfiction, fiction, book reviews, and journalism in publications such as Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The New York Times, Boston Magazine, Solstice, Seventh Wage, and The Boston Globe, and anthologies such as Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora and Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices on Migration, Survival, and New Beginnings. The Boston Book Festival chose her short story, “The Book of Life and Death,” for the 2020 One City One Story program, translating it into several languages, including Tagalog. Her writing has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright, US Artists, the Brother Thomas Fund, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and residencies at the Pink Door, MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, and Hedgebrook.
Before Brown, Talusan taught at the University of Oregon, Tufts University, and Brandeis University, where she was the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence. She was born in the Philippines, raised in New England, and lives outside of Boston.
