Professor Ava Chin

Dr. Ava Chin is an author, journalist, and Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the City University of New York (Graduate Center, where she is the head of American Studies, and the College of Staten Island). She is the author of the award-winning memoir Mott Street (Penguin Press, 2023), winner of the CALA Best Book Award and a PEN/Open Book Award Finalist, and Eating Wildly (Simon & Schuster, 2014), which won the M.F.K. Fisher Book Award for excellence in food writing. Mott Street, an ALA Notable Book and one of People magazine’s top books by Asian American authors, was a Best Book of the year in TIME, the San Francisco Chronicle, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews and Elle. Ava has appeared on NPR, PBS, and CSPAN, among others.

Ava Chin’s writing has appeared in The New York Times (“Urban Forager”), Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, Marie Claire, and SPIN. She is the recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers, Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, New York Foundation for the Arts, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, MacDowell, and the New York Institute for the Humanities, where she is a board member. A former slam poet, she has performed on numerous stages such as Joe’s Pub, the Knitting Factory, the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, and Woodstock 94, and contributed lyrics to Soul Coughing’s El Oso. The Huffington Post named her one of “Nine Contemporary Authors You Should Be Reading.” As a visiting scholar at the OCLW, she will be working on a new memoir about the long legs of U.S. immigration restrictions on the Chinese American diaspora during the McCarthy era and beyond through the intimate lens of her family in NYC’s Chinatown using archival research and family documents.