Alex Kuo’s Lipstick and Other Stories has won him the honor of the American Book Award. Kuo is Washington State University’s first writer-in-residence and chair of the Comparative American Cultures Program (CAC) and an English department faculty member. “The Peking Cowboy,” a story from the collection, appeared in the Spring 2002 Washington State Magazine.
Kuo teaches Asian American and Native American literatures in the CAC, cultures of the American West in American Studies, and creative writing in English. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship and grants from the United Nations and the Idaho Commission for the Arts for background research in China for his completed novel, The Man Who Dammed the Yangtze. In 1991-92 he taught in China as a Senior Fulbright Scholar, and in 1997-98 in Hong Kong as the Lingnan Visiting Scholar in American Studies.
The American Book Award was established by the Before Columbus Foundation “to acknowledge the excellence and multicultural diversity of American writing.” Kuo received the award at a ceremony in New York City in May.