Meet May’s Woman Warrior Writer Vanessa Hua, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and author of A River of Stars, Deceit and Other Possibilities, and Forbidden City. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a Steinbeck Fellowship and honors from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Asian American Journalists’ Association. A Bay Area native, she teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. www.vanessahua.com 

How did you come to author your life?

Years ago, on a reporting fellowship in South Korea, I told another journalist that I’d always wanted to write a book. She looked at me and said, “Well, then, write a book!” Dinnertime small talk, but her words resonated with me. I realized that if I truly wanted to achieve this goal, I needed to make it a priority. Writing in the mornings before work and at lunch and on weekends wasn’t enough; I needed to center my writing, to put the best part of myself in it even as I juggled other commitments.