Darien Hsu Gee is like no other writer working today. In her gorgeously lyrical, gratifyingly dense hybrid texts, she uses what seem at first like small stylistic decisions to offer startling and necessary social commentary. Gee’s work makes expert use of postmodern forms and experimental techniques to raise questions about the philosophy of language, to present the self as a cultural construct, to showcase speech as an inherently shared endeavor. Indeed, in these gorgeous and disruptive texts, the nuances of writerly technique are placed in service of entirely new definitions of community, otherness, and the self.
Darien Hsu Gee is the author of five novels published by Penguin Random House that have been translated into eleven languages. In 2021, her collection of micro essays, Allegiance, received the Bronze IPPY award in the Essays category. She also received a 2019 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship award for Other Small Histories and the 2015 Hawai‘i Book Publishers’ Ka Palapala Poʻokela Award of Excellence for Writing the Hawai‘i Memoir. She is the recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant and a Vermont Studio Center fellowship. In 2022, she served as executive editor for the anthology, Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World.
Gee holds a B.A. from Rice University and an M.F.A. from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She lives with her family on the Big Island of Hawai’i, Darien currently serves on the Hawaiʻi Island Leadership Council for the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation. Past board positions include the Friends and Foundation of the San Francisco Public Library, ZYZZYVA, and the Kahilu Theatre. Learn more at dariengee.com and writer-ish.com.