Bich Minh Nguyen's first novel, Short Girls, was published by Viking Penguin in July 2009. Her memoir-in-essays, Stealing Buddha's Dinner, was published by Viking Penguin in 2007. It received the PEN/Jerard Award from the PEN American Center and was named a Chicago Tribune Best Book of 2007, a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book, an Asian American Literature Award finalist, and a BookSense pick; it is also the Great Michigan Read selection for 2009-2010. Nguyen's work has also appeared in publications such as Gourmet magazine; Jane magazine; Dream Me Home Safely: Writers on Growing up in America; and Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose.
Nguyen was born in Saigon in 1974. On April 29, 1975, the night before the city fell, her family fled Viet Nam by ship. After staying in refugee camps in Guam and at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, they settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In Stealing Buddha's Dinner Nguyen writes about growing up in a Vietnamese household in an "All-American" city in the deep 1980s.
She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and currently teaches creative nonfiction, fiction, and Asian American Literature at Purdue University. She lives in Chicago and West Lafayette, Indiana with her husband Porter Shreve (whose third novel, When the White House Was Ours, was published by Houghton Mifflin in September 2008). Nguyen and Shreve have coedited three anthologies: 30/30: Thirty American Stories from the Last Thirty Years (Penguin Academic); Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: I & Eye (Longman); and The Contemporary American Short Story (Longman).
Nguyen's first name, Bich, is pronounced like "Bic"; however, most people call Bich "Bit." Nguyen, the Smith of Viet Nam, is pronounced something like Ngoo-ee-ehn (said quickly, as in one syllable), but most people tend to say "Win" or "New-IN" instead.