Jean Kwok, author portrait
© Jean Kwok

Jean Kwok

Jean Kwok was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to Brooklyn as a young girl. She is the author of the national bestseller Girl in Translation and Mambo in Chinatown. Jean received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard and completed an MFA in fiction at Columbia. She worked as an English teacher and Dutch-English translator at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and now writes full-time.

Books

Girl in Translation

What Students Will Be Reading: Campus Common Reading Roundup, 2025-26

With the fall semester in full swing, colleges and universities around the country have announced their Common Reading books for the upcoming 2025-26 academic year. We’ve compiled a list of over 284 programs and their title selections from publicly available sources, which you can download here: First-Year Reading 2025-26. We will continue to update this

Read more

2026 Catalog for First-Year & Common Reading

We are delighted to present our new First-Year & Common Reading Catalog for 2026! From award-winning fiction, poetry, memoir, and biography to new books about the environment, current events, history, public health, science, social justice, student success, and technology, the titles presented in our common reading catalog will have students not only eagerly flipping through

Read more