Hua Hsu, Delta Visiting Chair for Global Understanding

The Willson Center for Humanities and Arts welcomes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hua Hsu to UGA March 21-22, 2024 as the annual Delta Visiting Chair for Global Understanding. This event, which will include a reading and conversation with Ed Pavlić, Distinguished Research Professor of English, African American studies, and creative writing, is part of the Willson Center’s Global Georgia public event series and the UGA Humanities Festival. Hsu’s visit is presented in partnership with the Center for Asian Studies and the Georgia Review.

During his residency Hsu will also visit with students at UGA and Clarke Central High School, as well as participate in a public conversation on ‘zines co-hosted by the Georgia Review.

Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (2016) and the memoir Stay True (2022), which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography and the 2022 National Book Critics Circle award in autobiography. He is currently working on an essay collection titled Impostor Syndrome. Hsu is professor of literature at Bard College.

Hsu is a contributor to CBS News’s Sunday Morning; serves on the governance board of Critical Minded, a collaboration between the Ford Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation; and serves as judge for various literary competitions and fellowships, including the PEN America Literary Awards, Rona Jaffe Fellowship, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2018 (New Yorker); was a finalist for the James Beard Award for Food Writing in 2013 (for “Wokking the Suburbs,” Lucky Peach); and his work has been anthologized in Best Music Writing (2010 and 2012) and Best African American Essays 2010.

Hsu previously wrote for Artforum, The Atlantic, Grantland, Slate, and The Wire; his scholarly work has been published in American Quarterly, Criticism, PMLA, and Genre. He previously taught at Vassar College and was formerly a fellow at the New American Foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. Professor Hsu’s research and academic interests include Asian American studies, transpacific studies, critical ethnic studies, popular culture and subculture, and literary nonfiction.

The Delta Visiting Chair for Global Understanding, established by the Willson Center through the support of The Delta Air Lines Foundation, hosts outstanding artists, writers, socially engaged thinkers and cultural innovators who teach and perform research at the University of Georgia. Each holder of the Delta Visiting Chair engages the Georgia community through lectures, seminars, discussions and programs; they present global problems in local context, with a focus on how the arts and humanities can inform conversations on major contemporary issues.