Ava Chin, a 5th generation New Yorker, is the author of the award-winning Mott Street (Penguin Press), a recipient of the 2024 Nonfiction Book Award from the Chinese American Librarians Association, and Eating Wildly (Simon & Schuster), which won the 2015 M.F.K. Fisher Book Award for excellence in food writing. Mott Street, an ALA Notable Book, was a Best Book of the year by TIME, the San Francisco Chronicle, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews and Elle, and is one of People magazine’s top books by Asian American authors.

Her writing has appeared in The New York Times (“Urban Forager”), the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, Marie Claire, and Saveur, among others. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York Institute for the Humanities, Asian American Writers’ Workshop and MacDowell. She is a Professor of Creative Nonfiction and the head of the CUNY Graduate Center’s American Studies Certificate Program. The Huffington Post named her one of “9 Contemporary Authors You Should Be Reading.”