Beck Series: Melissa Valentine and Michael X. Wang

The Beck Series welcomes GLCA Prize winners for nonfiction, Melissa Valentine, and for fiction, Michael X. Wang.

Valentine is an award-winning writer from Oakland, CA whose work explores themes of race, trauma, and healing. Her debut memoir, The Names of All the Flowers, was the winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, the 2021 winner of CLMP’s Firecracker Award in Nonfiction, and the 2022 GLCA New Writers Award. Her work has appeared in New York Magazine, Guernica, Jezebel, Apogee, and other literary journals. She has been an artist fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts in Nonfiction Literature. In 2020 she was visiting professor at University of California at Santa Cruz. She is currently an Executive Editor at Callisto Media and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Wang was born in Fenyang, a coal-mining city in China’s mountainous Shanxi Province. He immigrated to the United States when he was six and holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Literature from Florida State University and a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from Purdue. His story collection, Further News of Defeat, won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the 2022 Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writer Award. It was also a finalist for the CLMP Firecracker Award. His debut novel, Lost in the Long March, came out November 1st from The Overlook Press. He is currently at work on two novel projects.