Acclaimed novelist to give reading at La Sierra University

The evening of literature will be held Monday, May 20 at 7:30 p.m. at La Sierra University’s Matheson Chapel. Admission is free.

Craig is an assistant professor in the creative writing department at UC Riverside and previously served as a visiting faculty member in the Department of English at Pomona College.She studied literature at Harvard University and received a Master of Fine Arts from UC Irvine. Her novel, “Miss Burma,” was published in 2017 by Grove Press and garnered many accolades. It was longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and an Amazon Best Book of the Month for Literature & Fiction, among other recognitions.

“Miss Burma” is based on the life of Craig’s grandparents  and of her mother, Louisa, who achieved national fame in Burma as a young beauty queen and film star before becoming a rebel leader of the Karen ethnic minority. The book covers nearly 40 years and details Louisa and her parents’ grappling with internal, intrafamilial and societal conflict intermingled with ethnic persecution, a world war, the rise of dictatorial powers, and the pursuit of freedom. 

The story follows Benny, one of the key figures in the novel and based on Craig’s Burmese-born Jewish grandfather. He marries Khin, part of the persecuted Karen ethnic minority in Burma. Strained by their own significant differences, the couple faces World War II by hiding, and later watches as their country is torn apart by what would become the world’s most protracted civil war. Their daughter, Louisa, in the midst of such wide-spread upheaval becomes the nation’s first beauty queen in 1956 at age 15. She wins again in 1958. Her own life, now in the spotlight, requires significant introspection and reckoning as the country reels along and while she suffers deep losses including the assassination of her first husband.

Craig’s first novel, “The Good Men” published by Penguin’s Riverhead Bookswas translated into six languages and became a national bestseller. Led by the stories she’d heard since childhood of her legendary mother and out of a desire to better understand her, Craig began the process of working on “Miss Burma” soon after finishing “The Good Men” in 2002.

“Another, bigger part was my sense of responsibility,” she said. “I’d been given, by birth, a certain perspective on Burma’s plight, particularly with respect to its persecuted indigenous groups, and I felt called to bring forth that perspective on the page.”

The messages Craig desires readers to take away from her work are multi-layered. “On the one hand, I did have a desire to demonstrate that what is happening now in Burma can really only be understood when seen in the light of the country’s past dealings with its ethnic nationalities,” she said. “There has been a long and horrific history of persecution of Burma’s minority groups by its majority leaders and army, and an equally horrific pattern of broken peace deals, ceasefires, and so on. But I’m a fiction writer and so much more interested in examining unresolvable inner tensions and outer questions than in making points or teaching lessons.”  

Formerly an actor in film and television, Craig grew up in Los Angeles where she currently resides with her husband who is also a writer, and their two teenage daughters.

Her acting career included co-starring in the Disney film “Myth of the White Wolf” and as a recurring character on the television series “Northern Exposure.” She also functioned as the live-action reference for the character Pocahontas in the Disney animated feature. However, the frequent Native American type-casting helped compel Craig’s move into an arena with greater options. 

“I left all that behind because I wanted, in writing, to be able to play whatever part I wished to, and also because I was tired of the poor quality of writing in most scripts that came my way,” Craig said.

She is working on a new novel, one “that is very different,” she says, “it takes place in the U.S. in contemporary times, yet its themes are informed by my past work.”

The book reading event is hosted by La Sierra University’s Department of English. La Sierra University is located at 4500 Riverwalk Parkway, Riverside. A campus map is available at https://lasierra.edu/map-and-directions/campus-map/. For further information call 951-785-2241 or email english@lasierra.edu.