Ava Chin

Ava Chin is the author of Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming (Penguin Press, 2023), an American Library Association Notable Book, and the award-winning Eating Wildly (Simon & Schuster, 2014), which won the the 2015 M.F.K. Fisher Book Award for excellence in food writing. Mott Street was a Best Book of the year by TIME, the San Francisco Chronicle, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews and Elle, and is one of People magazine’s top books by Asian American authors.

Her writing has appeared in The New York Times (“Urban Forager”), the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, Marie Claire, and Saveur, among others. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers, Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), New York Institute for the Humanities, Asian American Writers’ Workshop and MacDowell.

Chin is the editor of the anthology Split: Stories from a Generation Raised on Divorce (McGraw-Hill). Her fiction and poetry appear in Dick for a Day, It's Only Rock N Roll, Listen Up! Spoken Word Poetry, and A Gathering of the Tribes. She has been featured on CSPAN, PBS’ MetroFocus and Victory Garden, NPR and WNYC, and performed on stages at Woodstock ‘94, the Whitney Museum, and the Knitting Factory. As a lyricist, she contributed lyrics for the alternative rock band Soul Coughing’s El Oso (Warner Bros.).

Professor Chin holds a PhD from the University of Southern California, a MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and a BA from Queens College, CUNY. The Huffington Post named her one of "9 Contemporary Authors You Should Be Reading."