Maxine Hong Kingston, a Distinguished Visiting Scholar, participated in the University's 2007 Academic Conference, "Scholarship of Application: Integration and Connection," as a member of two panels, "The Artist, University, and Society," and "Iraq and Vietnam: A Conversation." 

Kingston, an award-winning author, has published Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts; China Men; Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book; Hawaii One Summer; To Be a Poet; The Fifth Book of Peace; Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace; and her most recent work, I Love A Broad Margin in My Life. She is known for novels that draw on her family's background as Chinese immigrants in the United States.  Woman Warrior won the National Book Critic's Circle Award for nonfiction and China Men won the American Book Award for nonfiction.  In 1997, she was awarded the National Humanities Award by the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Kingston is a senior lecturer at University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches creative writing. In 2011. Kingston participated in a Dialogue on Immigration with fellow writer Gish Jen as part of Suffolk's Civic Discourse Series with the Boston Athenaeum.