Hua Hsu: A Brooklyn Memoirist of Grief and Music
Updated: Oct 7
A note from our founder
Our thirteenth tribute in this new chapter goes to a writer who turned a devastating college loss into a Pulitzer Prize-winning meditation on friendship, identity, and music. Hua Hsu now teaches and writes from Brooklyn, still working in the same evocative register that made Stay True impossible to put down.
From Cupertino to Harvard
Hua Hsu was born in 1977 in San Francisco, California, to Taiwanese immigrants, and grew up in Cupertino before attending the University of California, Berkeley. He went on to earn his PhD in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University.
Chronicler of Subcultures and Sound
Hsu is celebrated for profound, evocative meditations on youth subcultures, music, immigrant identity, and grief. He joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2017, where his essays and cultural criticism range from critical race theory and dynamic music scenes to the strange textures of internet culture.
Stay True
In 2022, Hsu published his widely praised memoir, Stay True, chronicling his formative college years, the zine culture that shaped him, and the devastating loss of his close friend to a random act of violence. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named one of the top books of the year by major publications around the world.
Teaching and Advocacy in Brooklyn
Alongside his writing career, Hsu has served as an executive board member for the Asian American Writers' Workshop. He is a professor of English at Bard College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Bibliography
Non-Fiction & Memoirs
A Floating Chinaman: Don Lew and the Haunting of American Culture (2016) — Hsu's first book, a compelling work of cultural history that uses the life and archives of an eccentric, largely forgotten writer to explore how mid-20th-century Americans imagined China.
Stay True (2022) — His Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir; a deeply moving coming-of-age story centered on an intense college friendship in the 1990s, the agony of sudden grief, and the power of art to help us heal.
READ HSU
Start with Stay True — it's the book that made his name, and it's every bit as devastating and tender as its reputation suggests. From there, A Floating Chinaman shows the same historical curiosity at work in an entirely different register. Get the book.
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