Grubbies

About Xujun

Xujun Eberlein is an immigrant writer who has lived half a life each on two sides of the globe. Her personal essay, "Ms. Daylily," was selected by Vivian Gornick and Robert Atwan for The Best American Essays 2023 . The essay also won the prestigious Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction, judged by Melissa Febos, who commented that "Rarely have I read a work so sweeping and so achingly intimate, drawn with a careful and skilled hand, a system of images and artfully excerpted diary entries that draw the constellation of a life, of multiple lives, their gorgeous and devastating entwinement.”

Xujun's debut short story collection, APOLOGIES FORTHCOMING, won the Tartt First Fiction Award and also a runner-up for the Drake Emerging Writer's Award. Her fiction, nonfiction, and translation works have appeared in Agni, American Literary Review, Asia Literary Review, Brevity, the Iowa Review, Iron Horse, Meridian, Michigan Quarterly Review, New England Review, Night Train, Post Road, Prism International, Stand, StoryQuarterly, Walrus, and elsewhere. In addition to literary magazines, she also wrote for Foreign Policy and LA Review of Books. Other prizes and honors she received include: winner of the American Literary Review's Creative Nonfiction Contest, Artist’s Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, fiction scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, notable essay in the Best American Essays, special mentions in The Pushcart Prize, and more.

Xujun holds a Ph.D. in Transportation Science from MIT and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Emerson College. She is currently working on a memoir.