Speculative Pasts, Speculative Futures: Vanessa Hua, Laleh Khadivi, Maxine Hong Kingston, Audrey T. Williams

When the official record falls silent, writers interrogate omissions and erasures to bring to life those left behind and forge new trajectories.

Join Vanessa Hua, an Ann Getty Endowed Visiting Artist-Scholar and acclaimed authors Maxine Hong Kingston, Laleh Khadivi, and Audrey T. Williams, for readings and a panel discussion exploring how to write within and against the archive. We'll examine how to rewrite our understanding of history, challenge dominant narratives across genres, and shape our collective futures.

Vanessa Hua

Vanessa Hua is the nationally-bestselling author of Coyoteland, A River of Stars, Forbidden City, Deceit and Other Possibilities, as well as the forthcoming Uprooted. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a California Arts Council Fellowship, and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, among other honors. Previously an award-winning columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, she teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program and elsewhere. While in residency at USF, she will work on Painterland, a novel inspired by Bernice Bing—a queer Chinese American painter at the heart of San Francisco's Beat scene—drawing on Bay Area archives and community memory to recover lost stories.

Laleh Khadivi

Laleh Khadivi is the author of four novels, including The Age of Orphans, which received a Whiting Writers' Award; The Walking; A Good Country, a New York Times Editors' Choice; and the forthcoming Female Life on Planet Earth. Her essays, stories, and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, LA Times, McSweeney's and Lithub among others. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Stein Fellowship at Stanford University, and a John Felice Fellowship in Rome. A former documentary filmmaker, she has taught and spoken at universities and literary festivals across the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia. Born in Esfahan, Iran, she works now as an Associate Professor and Chair of the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Born in Stockton, California, and educated at UC Berkeley, Maxine Hong Kingston achieved critical acclaim with The Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men (1980), which won a National Book Critics Circle Award and a National Book Award. Throughout a prolific career that includes the novel Tripmaster Monkey and the book-length poem I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, Kingston has maintained a deep commitment to storytelling and community, notably leading therapeutic poetry workshops for veterans. A professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, she has also received the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal. 

Audrey T. Williams

Audrey T. Williams is a Southern Black writer with Indo-Burmese heritage. She is an award-winning author and poet whose speculative projects interrogate the crossroads of diasporic memory and imagination. Her poetry and prose explore ancestral cultural preservation through hybrid literary forms. Audrey is the winner of the 2025 Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction contest for her debut speculative short story collection, "Legacies, Interrupted." Her work appears in Peregrine Journal, Intima Journal of Narrative Medicine, Lightspeed Magazine, FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, Space & Time Magazine, Tar Baby Journal, and beyond. She facilitates poetry circles as an expressive arts healing practice and is the founder of Ancestral Futures: Liberation Literary Arts. Find her on Instagram @audthentic_stories and AncestralFutures.org.

This event is free and open to the public!