Grace Talusan is an Assistant Teaching Professor of English in the Nonfiction Writing Program in the Department of English at Brown University. She teaches creative nonfiction courses which include courses that shift our attention to wonder, joy, and awe, memoirs of migration, and Asian American experiences. She mentors many students throughout their lives, supporting them in their goals and dreams as writers, from publishing their first piece, working on their honors thesis, and for some, their first book.
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.
Talusan 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. She has taught nationally at writers workshops including the Kenyon Review Writers Week, YoungArts, Community of Writers, and others.
Talusan has published book reviews and long form journalism in publications such as The New York Times, Boston Magazine, and The Boston Globe; creative nonfiction in Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Solstice, Seventh Wave, and Trace Fossils; and fiction in 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. Talusan's writing has been supported by the National Endowanment for the Arts, the Fulbright, US Artists, the Brother Thomas Fund, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and residencies at the Wedding Cake House, the Pink Door, MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, and Hedgebrook.
