Maureen Bhutong Boyd
Nonfiction
Nanaimo, BC
Maureen Bhutong Boyd is a Thai-Scottish-Californian-Canadian writer and uses the pronouns she and her. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, to immigrants from Thailand and Canada. She earned a degree in English from California State University in Los Angeles, pursued graduate studies in literature and culture at the University of Washington in Seattle, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University in Oregon. She worked as a union organizer and leader of labor campaigns around the United States for fifteen years, in addition to many years as an activist for economic and racial justice in the Bay Area of California.
Her writing appears in Catamaran Literary Reader, The Pinch, Bellingham Review, Joyland Magazine, and TIMBER, amongst others. She has read her work at APAture, Kearny Street Workshop's Festival for Emerging Asian Pacific American Artists, and an excerpt from her unpublished novel was a finalist for Hidden River Art's William Van Wert Award for Fiction. For ""this is my body,” a storytelling showcase for women of color in the California Bay Area, she wrote and performed an autobiographical monologue exploring how her mother’s death compelled her to confront questions around internalized oppression and her identity as a mixed-race daughter of immigrants.
She has been named a finalist for the Periplus Fellowship, and faculty and alumni of Pacific University’s MFA program have selected both her fiction and nonfiction for featured craft talks. In addition to the Ragdale Residency, she has been accepted to the Storyknife Writing Residency in Homer, Alaska. She is the mother of twins, and she, her husband, and three pugs currently reside in British Columbia, Canada.