I’m an award-winning writer, author of critically-acclaimed memoir They Called Us Exceptional, and a creative nonfiction teacher at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn. I help people craft compelling ideas into propulsive, emotionally resonant narratives that examine power, success, and identity. If you want to work together, please get in touch.

My debut memoir, They Called Us Exceptional, explores the hidden price immigrant families pay to assimilate and achieve success in America. Called “a marvel” by Atlantic national editor Scott Stossel, They Called Us Exceptional was longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award, named one of the best books of 2023 by Amazon and Audible; nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award; and received coverage from Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert,” NPR, PBS NewsHour, CNN, and MSNBC. It’s currently taught at institutions like Johns Hopkins University, George Washington University, and UC Irvine. The book was borne from my investigative essay for Jezebel, “Stories About My Brother,” which won a Writers Guild Award and helped elevate a national conversation on mental health and familial estrangement in Asian American communities. 

As a senior reporter at Jezebel, I co-hosted the irreverent Webby Award-nominated politics podcast “Big Time Dicks.” Before that, I covered the 2016 election for Cosmopolitan.com, where I reported and hosted two mini-docs on the refugee crisis in Jordan. Most notably, my interview with Ivanka Trump ripped “the halo off of Trump,” according to the Washington Post. I have also served as a contributing politics editor at Refinery29 and a segment producer at Crooked Media’s “Lovett or Leave It” podcast. My bylines appear in the Atlantic, the Guardian, Guernica, Harper’s Bazaar, Salon, Elle, Esquire, and Marie Claire. In 2021, my reporting was featured in the Best American Magazine Writing.

Outside of writing, you can find me running long distances, lifting heavy-ish things at the gym, painting and drawing, and sharing infrequent reflections on Substack and Instagram.