Biography
Xu Xi is an Indonesian American raised in Hong Kong. She speaks English and Chinese, even though those languages are not her parents' native languages. Her father traded manganese ore and her mother was a pharmacist. Xu started writing stories in English when she was a child. As an adult, she maintained a parallel career in international marketing for 18 years, working for several major multinationals, while writing and publishing fiction. She left corporate life in 1998.
Xu Xi is a graduate of the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Now a U.S. citizen, she is on the low-residency MFA fiction and creative nonfiction faculty at Vermont College in Montpelier; she has served as faculty chair since 2009. As of 2010, she became writer-in-residence, at City University of Hong Kong, where she established and directs the first, low-residency MFA which specializes in Asian writing in English.
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