Salem State Writers Series - Yao Xiao and Alexandria Peary

Yao Xiao is an award-winning author, cartoonist and illustrator. She is a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, Ignatz Award Nominee, Define American Creative Fellow, Think!Chinatown Artist in Residence. Her debut graphic novel Everything Is Beautiful, And I’m Not Afraid received praise by Publishers Weekly and Ms. Magazine. Her debut children’s book How To Solve A Problem was a Best Book of 2020 by Publishers Weekly and received a Kirkus starred review. She has been publishing syndicated cartoon columns on Autostraddle since 2014 and has been published in The New Yorker and The Washington Post. A prolific illustrator for clients such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, TIME Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, and Entertainment Weekly, Yao Xiao currently teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City where she lives and creates. Salem State English professor Alexandria Peary will open the evening. The child of a German mother and American father, Alexandria Peary grew up in the country store her parents owned in central Maine. She earned a BA at Colby College, MFAs from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and a PhD in Composition from the University of New Hampshire. Her poetry collections are Fall Foliage Called Bathers & Dancers (2008), Lid to the Shadow (2011), Control Bird Alt Delete (2014), and The Water Draft (2019). Peary’s other books are Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century (with Tom C. Hunley 2015) and Prolific Moment: Theory and Practice of Mindfulness for Writing (2018).