To Be the Poet

Maxine Hong Kingston

  • 2008 Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, National Book Foundation

1. I Choose the Poet's Life

2. I Call on the Muses of Poetry, and Here's What I Get

3. Spring Harvest

  • Cover: To Be the Poet

Author photos: c. AP/Wide World Photos

Maxine Hong Kingston, Senior Lecturer for Creative Writing at the University of California, Berkeley, delivered the 2000 William E. Massey Lectures at Harvard, on which this book is based. For her memoirs and fiction, The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, and Hawaii One Summer, Kingston has earned numerous awards, among them the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Pen West Award for Fiction, an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Literature Award, and a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the rare title of "Living Treasure of Hawai'i." In addition, The Fifth Book of Peace will be published in the Spring of 2003.