Amber Wong is an environmental engineer and writer in Seattle who writes about culture, identity, and her firsthand knowledge about risks posed by hazardous waste sites. Her personal narratives explore her fourth-generation American life through the cultural themes of scarcity and abundance, comfort and unfamiliarity. She’s intrigued about how the statics of culture – ethnicity, gender, even one’s profession – bend the dynamics of modern-day America, and is happily searching for that intersect where her engineering and her writing selves comfortably meet.
Cleanup – literally and metaphorically – weaves through her work, not necessarily because she wants it to, but because it is part of her being.
Recent work has been published in CRAFT (winner of the 2022 CRAFT Creative Nonfiction Award), The Sun, River Teeth, Fourteen Hills, Under the Gum Tree, Craft, Pangyrus, The Plentitudes, Creative Nonfiction, Tahoma Literary Review, and other literary magazines and anthologies. Her short piece, “How I Learned to Write,” won the Writer’s Connection essay contest. Amber earned an MFA from Lesley University and her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford University. She is currently seeking representation for her memoir.
Honors: Author’s Fellowship to Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing (2019), Artist-in-Residence at Willapa Bay AiR (2015, 2022), Contributor to Bread Loaf in Sicily (2014) and Bread Loaf Orion (2016).