Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Shirley Geok-lin Lim was born in Malacca, Malaysia, came to the United States as a Fulbright and Wein International Scholar in 1969, and completed her Ph.D. in British and American Literature at Brandeis University in 1973. Her first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula (1980), received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has also published four volumes of poetry: No Man’s Grove (1985); Modern Secrets (1989); Monsoon History (1994), which is a retrospective selection of her work; and What the Fortune Teller Didn’t Say (1998). Bill Moyers featured Lim for a PBS special on American poetry, “Fooling with Words” in 1999, and again on the program “Now” in February 2002. Her novel, Sister Swing, was published by Marshall Cavendish Press in 2006. She is also the author of three books of short stories and a memoir, Among the White Moon Faces (1996), which received the 1997 American Book Award for non-fiction. Her first novel, Joss and Gold was published by the Feminist Press in 2001. Lim’s co-edited anthology The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology received the 1990 American Book Award. She has published two critical studies, Nationalism and Literature: Writing in English from the Philippines and Singapore (1993) and Writing South East/Asia in English: Against the Grain (1994), and has edited/co-edited many volumes and special issues of journals, most recently, the special issue of Tulsa Studies (2003) on transnational feminism, and Studies in the Literary Imagination on Asian American literary criticism. She has served as chair of Women’s Studies, and is currently professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.