Muriel Leung
BIO
Muriel Leung is the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning novel How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster, which was also the finalist for the Publishing Triangle Award and Gotham Book Prize. She has also published several poetry collections that include the Poetry Society of America Four Quartets Prize-winning Imagine Us, The Swarm, Bone Confetti, and Images Seen to Images Felt. Her creative work has also appeared in numerous literary journals and venues, including The Baffler, Gulf Coast, Cream City Review, The Collagist, and Fairy Tale Review. She has received fellowships from organizations including Black Mountain Institute, VONA/Voices Workshop, the Community of Writers, and other nationally recognized literary programs.
Beyond her work as an author, she is dedicated to advancing contemporary literary culture through editorial leadership and community engagement. She serves on the Board of Directors for Apogee Journal, a literary journal centering voices from the margins, and is the current Content Editor for Gotham Literature, a digital journal for short-form writing. She was also the former co-host of The Blood-Jet Writing Hour Podcast, which platforms underrepresented writers and artists through interviews and reviews of their work, and has also worked as a publicist for Kaya Press, the first publisher of Asian Diasporic literature in the U.S.
She received her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from University of Southern California where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Humanities in a Digital World Fellow. Her research combines creative writing, Asian American literature, critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, and digital humanities. Her academic interests focus on how literature and cultural production engage questions of race, diaspora, colonialism, environmental crisis, and queer worldmaking. She is particularly interested in experimental and hybrid forms that challenge conventional distinctions between genres and that illuminate the overlapping structures of power shaping contemporary life.