Monique Truong is the author of the novels The Sweetest Fruits, The Book of Salt, and Bitter in the Mouth, and her work has been published in fifteen countries. Her awards and honors include the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the Asian American Literary Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, and the 2021 John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, given for a body of work that offers incisive, original commentary on American themes, experiments with form, and encompasses a range of human experiences.