Monique Truong is an award-winning Vietnamese-American author. She is best known for her novels The Book of Salt and Bitter in the Mouth. Truong was born in Saigon, Vietnam and immigrated to the United States with her family in 1975. She graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. Truong has received numerous awards for her writing, including the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the Stonewall Book Award, and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. She is a member of the PEN American Center and the Asian American Writers' Workshop. Truong currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she continues to write and teach.