Celeste Ng

Celeste Ng (/sɪˈlɛst ɪŋ/;[1] Chinese name: 伍綺詩) (born 1980) is an American author.

Background
Ng was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1980. Her parents moved to the US from Hong Kong in the late 1960s. Her father, who died in 2004, was a physicist who worked for NASA at the Glenn Research Center, while her mother was a chemist who taught at Cleveland State University.

When Ng was ten, her family moved from Pittsburgh to Shaker Heights, Ohio, and she attended the schools in the Shaker Heights City School District. At Shaker Heights High School, Ng was involved with the student group on race relations for three years, and was co-editor of the school's literary magazine, Semanteme. She graduated from high school in 1998.

Ng attended Harvard University, where she completed a bachelor's degree in English in 2002. After a sobering brush with textbook publishing and taking a fiction writing class, Ng decided to pursue writing as a career. She then attended graduate school at the University of Michigan's creative writing program (now the Helen Zell Writers Program), where she earned a Master of Fine Arts in writing. While at Michigan, Ng won the Hopwood Award for her short story, "What Passes Over."

While on a book tour for her debut novel Everything I Never Told You, Ng stated that her favorite book when she was a child was Harriet the Spy. Some of her favorite books and inspirations include: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout, as well as classics like: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and The Count of Monte Cristo.

Career
Ng was a recipient of a Pushcart Prize in 2012 for her story "Girls, At Play." Ng's fiction has appeared in the literary magazines One Story, TriQuarterly, and Subtropics. Her essays have appeared in Kenyon Review Online and The Millions. Ng taught writing at the University of Michigan, and she has also taught at Grub Street in Boston. Ng also was an editor of blogs at the website Fiction Writers Review for three years.

Her debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, is a literary thriller that focuses on an American family in 1970s Ohio. The novel had four drafts and one revision before completion, which took 6 years. While working on her first novel, Ng stated that she pulled from her own experiences of racism as well as her family and friends. The book, which the Los Angeles Times described as an "excellent first novel about family, love, and ambition," won Amazon Book of the Year in 2014. Everything I Never Told You has been translated into 15 languages.

Ng's second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, was released on September 12, 2017, and tells the story of two families in Shaker Heights, Ohio. The novel, which The New York Times has called "ambitious and accomplished" is currently being adapted for an eight-episode series on Hulu, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. In March 2018, Entertainment Weekly proclaimed that Ng was "the novelist of the moment."