Grace Talusan is the author of THE BODY PAPERS, which won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant writing, the Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection. In 2022, she was awarded fellowships from United States Artists, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Brother Thomas Fund. She has received support for her writing as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to the Philippines and as an Artist Fellow from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Her nonfiction writing spans many topics, from a magazine article about a nuclear reactor, an essay about an autopsy assistant, and how to make yogurt. In both nonfiction and fiction, she returns to lifelong obsessions with family stories, silences and erasures, trauma, and the rupture of immigration. She has published fiction, essays, book reviews, and journalism in publications such as Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, New York Times, Boston, and Boston Globe, and in the anthologies Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora, Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices on Migration, Survival, and New Beginnings, and Nonwhite and Woman. The Boston Book Festival chose Talusan’s short story, “The Book of Life and Death,” for the One City One Story program, translating it into several languages, including Filipino.
As a writing teacher, she believes in cultivating a sustainable writing practice through compassion and community. Before joining the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown, she was the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University where she taught creative writing.
