Bonnie Tsui

Bonnie Tsui is the author of American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods (Free Press), winner of the 2009 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and Best of 2009: 50 Notable Bay Area Books selection. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, she has also written for the Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic Adventure and Mother Jones. She is the editor of A Leaky Tent Is a Piece of Paradise (Sierra Club Books), a collection of essays on the natural World.

Her new book, Why We Swim, was published in April 2020; it was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a TIME Magazine Must-Read Book of 2020, a Los Angeles Times bestseller and 2020 Book Club pick and a Boston Globe bestseller, and received praise from NPR, Oprah, Outside, Booklist, Kirkus and more. Her first children’s book, Sarah & the Big Wave, about the first woman to surf Mavericks, will be published in May 2021, and has already been honored by the Junior Library Guild.

In the spring of 2020, Bonnie was busy writing pieces about the fact that the coronavirus has exposed a contagion of xenophobia, including this March San Francisco Chronicle piece and this April New York Times piece.

A graduate of Harvard University, she lives, surfs and swims in the Bay Area.