Chair of the PEN Literary Award Committee from 2014-18, Monique Truong is a novelist, essayist, and librettist. Her novels are The Sweetest Fruits (Viking, 2019), Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), and The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). They have received numerous awards including the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN America Robert Bingham Fellowship, Bard Fiction Prize, and Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Truong serves as the vice president of the Authors Guild, was the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College in Fall 2016, a U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellow in 2015, and a 2010 Guggenheim fellow.