Shirley Geok-lin Lim


Shirley Geok-lin Lim is an American writer of poetry, fiction, and criticism. She was both the first woman and the first Asian person to be awarded Commonwealth Poetry Prize for her first poetry collection, Crossing The Peninsula, which she published in 1980. In 1997, she received the American Book Award for her memoir, ''Among the White Moon Faces.''

Biography

Lim was born in the state capital of Malacca City and lived with her five brothers, but was abandoned by her mother during childhood.
Her first poem was published in the Malacca Times when she was ten and by the age of eleven, she had decided that she wanted to become a poet.
Lim had her early education at Infant Jesus Convent under the then British colonial education system. She won a federal scholarship to the University of Malaya, where she earned a B.A. first class honors degree in English. In 1969, at the age of twenty-four, she entered graduate school at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts under a Fulbright scholarship, and received a PhD in English and American Literature in 1973.

Personal life

Shirley Geok-lin Lim is married to Charles Bazerman, a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara. She has one child, named Gershom.

Career

Lim was a professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as being chair of the Women's Studies Department, until her retirement in 2012. She has also taught internationally at the National University of Singapore, the National Institute Education of Nanyang Technological University, and was the Chair Professor at the University of Hong Kong where she also taught poetry and creative writing. She has authored several books of poems, short stories, and criticism, and serves as editor and co-editor of numerous scholarly works. Lim is a cross-genre writer, although she primarily identifies herself as a poet. Her research interests include:
Lim has received numerous literary awards, among which are:
  • Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer Award, 1996;
  • American Book Award, which she won twice, once with her co-edited anthology, The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology, and the second time, with her memoir, Among the White Moon Faces ; and
  • Asiaweek Short Story award for "Mr. Tang's Uncles"

    Books and articles

  • Memoir:
  • *"Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian American Memoir of Homelands"
  • Fiction:
  • *"Joss and Gold"
  • *Sister Swing
  • Books of Poetry and Short Stories:
  • * "Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems"
  • * "Another Country"
  • * "Life's Mysteries"
  • * "No Man's Grove and Other Poems"
  • * "Modern Secrets: New and Selected Poems"
  • * "Monsoon History"
  • * "Two Dreams: New and Selected Stories"
  • * "What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say"
  • * "Do You Live In?"
  • * "Ars Poetica for the Day"
  • * "In Praise of Limes"
  • * "Dawns Tomorrow"
  • Critical books:
  • * "Nationalism and Literature: English-language Writing from the Philippines and Singapore"
  • * "Writing South/East Asia in English"
  • Critical essays:
  • *
  • Some publications edited or co-edited:
  • * "The Forbidden Stitch"
  • * "Approaches to Teaching Kingston's The Woman Warrior"
  • * "One World of Literature"
  • * "Transnational Asia Pacific: Gender, Culture, and the Public Sphere"
  • * "Writing Out of Turn"
  • * "Before Its Time, Of Its Time: The Transnational Female Bildungsroman and Kartini's Letters of A Javanese Princess"
  • * "Asian American Literature: Leavening the Mosaic", in "Contemporary U. S. Literature: Multicultural Perspectives"
  • * "Power, Race, and Gender in Academe: Strangers in the Tower?"
  • * "Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing"
  • * "English-Language Creative Writing in Hong Kong: Colonial Stereotype and Process," in Pedagogy 1
  • * "The Center Can Hold: U.S. Women's Studies and Global Feminism"
  • * "The Futures for Hong Kong English", co-authored with Kingsley Bolton
  • * "Transnational Americans: Asian Pacific American Literature of Anamnesia"
  • * "Global Asia as Post-Legitimation: A Response to Ambroise Kom's 'Knowledge and Legitimation'". Mots Pluriels.
  • * "Old Paradigms, New Differences: Comparative American studies", in Cultural Encounters
  • * "Complications of Feminist and Ethnic Literary Theories in Asian American Literature", in "Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization"
  • * Foreword to "Asian American Autobiographers: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook"
  • * "The Columbia Companion to the 20th Century American Short Story". David Wong Louie.