Leslie Nguyen-Okwu

Leslie Nguyen-Okwu is a Vietnamese Nigerian American writer and journalist with bylines in The New York Times, BBC, National Geographic, The Economist, and Harper’s Bazaar. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Aspen Institute’s Summer Words, Hedgebrook, Tin House, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Disquiet International Literary Program, Mesa Refuge, and VONA. She holds a BA in International Relations from Stanford University, dropped out of a Master’s in Public Policy at Harvard after a year of classes and chemo, and is now an MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction at Saint Mary’s College of California, at work on a memoir called American Hyphen about belonging between Asian America and Black America.