Since obtaining a BA from Knox College and an MFA from Iowa in the early 1960s, more than three hundred-and-fifty of Alex Kuo’s poems, short stories, photographs and essays have appeared in magazines and newspapers, most recently in amerasia journal, Ploughshares, Seattle Post-Intelligence, and in anthologies such as Craig Lesley's Dreamers and Desperadoes and Andre Codrescu's American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century. Kuo has been an administrator and a teacher of writing, literature and ethnic studies for more than forty-five years at several American colleges and universities as well as in China at Peking University, Beijing Forestry University, Jilin University, Fudan University, and Hong Kong's Baptist University. During this period he received three National Endowment for the Arts awards, grants from the United Nations and the Idaho Commission for the Arts for background research in China for his novel Long River. His most recent books are; This Fierce Geography (poems/1999), Lipstick and Other Stories (2001) which received the American Book Award in 2002, Panda Diaries (2006), and White Jade and Other Stories (2008).