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Aimee Liu on Muck Rack

Aimee Liu

Los Angeles
As seen in: Authors For Democracy, Medium, The Startup, Yahoo Entertainment, HuffPost, Los Angeles Times, Content Is Not King, Substack, Newsday, Kansas City Star, The Portland Press Herald and
Covers:  Literature, Creative Writing, Health, Psychology, Book Reviews, Wellness, Eating Disorders, History
Doesn't Cover: Math, Economics
Author of novels -- Glorious Boy, Flash House, Cloud Mountain, and Face. Nonfiction includes Gaining and Solitaire. Newsletter@ aimeeliu.substack.com
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Op-Ed: The second dose is magic. Within limits

Op-Ed: The second dose is magic. Within limits

Los Angeles Times — The second dose was supposed to be my reunion pass. Thanks to COVID-19, I couldn't get back to Connecticut for my mother's 100th birthday at Christmastime, but once we were both fully vaccinated, I'd feel safe to fly across the country. We'd hug for the first time since 2019.
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12 Great Nerd Novels You Might Have Missed

12 Great Nerd Novels You Might Have Missed

Medium — The novelists Susan M. Gaines and Jean Hegland coined this term when they were exchanging manuscript drafts in 2013 and realized there was something similar about the way they were dealing with formal knowledge in their stories. Jean was writing about Shakespearean scholarship in her 2015 novel and Susan was writing about ornithology and microbiology in Accidentals , published last year.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #232: Mary Morris

The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #232: Mary Morris

The Rumpus — The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #232: Mary Morris With her groundbreaking 1988 memoir Nothing to Declare , Mary Morris created a new and singularly feminist genre of travel writing. Mary loves to travel alone, and her travel memoirs center on the solo experience of journeys taken-in Central America, through Southern California, down the Mississippi River, and across Mongolia from Beijing to Berlin.
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The Other Western Front

The Other Western Front

History News Network — Aimee Liu is the author of the new novel Glorious Boy , as well as the historical novels Flash House, Cloud Mountain, and Face and many works of nonfiction. More at aimeeliu.net As a historical novelist, I long ago learned that there's no virtual substitute for smelling, tasting, and walking the physical ground where a story takes place.
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An Exploration of Belonging: Talking with Donna Hemans

An Exploration of Belonging: Talking with Donna Hemans

The Rumpus — An Exploration of Belonging: Talking with Donna Hemans Jamaica-born writer Donna Hemans has been said to hear "life sung by a chorus, not a single voice." Her plots are as intense as thrillers yet as resonant as poetry, and the lyricism and emotional honesty of her work has earned her comparisons to Jamaica Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat.
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Finding My Story in the Colonial Past of the Andaman Islands

Finding My Story in the Colonial Past of the Andaman Islands

Literary Hub — My new novel Glorious Boy began with a dream. On a tropical island during an emergency evacuation, a young girl was hiding in a dense rainforest with a small, mute white boy in her care. The girl, local to this island, knew the boy's parents would not take her with them.
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Op-Ed: John Boalt's primary legacy is a racist anti-Chinese essay. Strip his name from UC Berkele...

Op-Ed: John Boalt's primary legacy is a racist anti-Chinese essay. Strip his name from UC Berkele...

Los Angeles Times — The law school at UC Berkeley, after a yearlong review, has formally asked the chancellor to take the name "Boalt" off its building. The question remains, though, why John Henry Boalt's name was ever affixed to University of California property in the first place.
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Op-Ed: From real estate porn to love at first sight

Op-Ed: From real estate porn to love at first sight

Los Angeles Times — One year ago my husband and I decided to sell our home of 15 years. We loved it, our Big House. We had seen our youngest son through high school there, and had recently completed a major renovation.
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The Opposite Of Darkness

The Opposite Of Darkness

HuffPost — Why does this story matter? Because of the feeling. Because of the love. Because Carolyn Hall Young embodies the opposite of darkness, and because you never know what you'll get to be grateful for. I want to tell you about one extraordinary human being. She's the artist Carolyn Hall Young.
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Op-Ed: Political correctness may have run amok, but it's better than when casual racism ruled

Op-Ed: Political correctness may have run amok, but it's better than when casual racism ruled

Los Angeles Times — Today it's popular to say that political correctness is destroying America, but a recently discovered set of century-old clippings offer a cautionary reminder of what our country was like without political correctness. From Oregon to South Carolina, journalists and their editors in 1906 felt free to trumpet racial epithets and outright lies, including those they printed about my American grandmother and my Chinese grandfather.
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Why Writers Should "Read" This Election Like a Literary Novel

Why Writers Should "Read" This Election Like a Literary Novel

The Startup — As a teacher of creative writing and the author of four novels, I find it impossible to watch the unfolding spectacle of America's 2020 presidential election without marveling at its story structure. Anyone who wants to understand why well-crafted fiction casts such a powerful spell over readers has only to observe the grip that this year's U.S.
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The Ups and Downs of Intermittent Fasting

The Ups and Downs of Intermittent Fasting

Medium — At this point, essentially 1.5 months in, I expected to feel upbeat and accustomed to the regimen. After all, I'm persistent to the point of stubbornness. I also have a distant history of anorexia, which some say could raise the risk of my overdoing this fasting business.
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Writing Through Emergency

Writing Through Emergency

Medium — Several weeks ago, as I began composing an MFA commencement address to deliver at my college this month, I found myself returning over and over to two particular words: emergence and emergency. The connection was hardly a mystery. The writers who were about to graduate would be emerging into a moment of historical emergency.Global pandemic.
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Pathos and Bathos in "The Crown"

Pathos and Bathos in "The Crown"

Medium — Discovering the royal keys to addictive drama 1 1 an abrupt, presumably unintended juxtaposition of the exalted and the commonplace, producing a ludicrous effect an element in experience or in artistic representation evoking or compassion One of my creative writing students recently mentioned the twinning of pathos and bathos in a book she was reading, and I realized I'd never given this twinning much thought.
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The Primal Power of Stories That Evoke Yearning and Dread

The Primal Power of Stories That Evoke Yearning and Dread

Medium — Primal emotion is the aim of all great writing. By primal I mean the deepest, oldest, and most fundamental wellsprings of human need. And since yearning and dread are the most fundamental of all emotions, they're essential for serious...
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Orchids of the Andamans

Orchids of the Andamans

Medium — The job of the novelist is to create a fictional world so convincing that the reader will suspend their natural disbelief and "buy" the characters and their passions and fears, as well as their areas of expertise. To an extent, that means that the writer must adopt those same passions.
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Is Your Child A Late Talker?

Is Your Child A Late Talker?

Medium — Little Albert Einstein was a handful. He threw tantrums, resisted potty training, ignored anything or anyone he found boring, and didn't speak his first word until the age of three. His parents (remember, this was the 1880s) feared he was "mentally retarded." His teachers despaired of his ability to learn.
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What Will We Learn From This Pandemic?

What Will We Learn From This Pandemic?

Medium — When COVID-19 recedes - as eventually it will - into our collective rear view, what aspects of this pandemic will we carry forward? The subjective nature of memory will doubtless shape the reflections that emerge, but the value we place on memory itself also will play a role.
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Better Lockdown Living through Instagram

Better Lockdown Living through Instagram

Medium — It's summer in the middle of a pandemic and the worst economic crisis of our lifetime. Each day the ews seems to worsen, and I haven't dared to visit the beach even once since March, though I live just three miles from the Pacific.
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The Most Magical Father I Never Met

The Most Magical Father I Never Met

Medium — In my experience, fathers tend to fall into two general camps. There are the dads so preoccupied with their own interests and careers and financially supporting their families that they rarely interact with their kids.
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Family Photos Can Change You

Family Photos Can Change You

Medium — Lucky for me, my father was a packrat. Dad spoke little about his childhood in China during the Warlord Era, but he kept suitcases full of artifacts, most of which only surfaced after his death in 2007. Among these mementos, I discovered photographs that swept me back in time and introduced me to relatives who belonged to a lost world.
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When Anti-Miscegenation Laws Reflected the Worst Kind of Bigotry

When Anti-Miscegenation Laws Reflected the Worst Kind of Bigotry

Medium — "Los Angeles Heiress Elopes With a Chink" That headline still shocks me. It shouldn't. Epithets like "chink"and "Chinaman" may have fall en from favor, but as we've seen throughout the past year, anti-Asian hate seethes just below America's surface. And historically, nothing triggers racist venom like the prospect of "mongrelization."
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The Mysterious WWII Hero Whose Daring Escape From an Occupied Island Was Dwarfed by His Return as...

The Mysterious WWII Hero Whose Daring Escape From an Occupied Island Was Dwarfed by His Return as...

historyofyesterday.com — M ajor A. Denis McCarthy was a complicated hero. Before World War II (WWII), as Superintendent of Police for India's Andaman Islands, he led a brutal attack on the remote archipelago's indigenous Jarawa tribe. And just days before Japan seized the islands in March 1942, McCarthy and 11 others fled across the Bay of Bengal by motor launch.
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How Death Can Teach Us to Make Meaning From the Inexplicable

How Death Can Teach Us to Make Meaning From the Inexplicable

Medium — I kept a large green votive candle burning as a form of prayer during the last six months of my niece's life. The eldest of my brother's four daughters, Amelia was only thirty-six. She'd spent her last decade tending, advising, loving, supervising, and comforting teens in...
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