Helen Zia

Helen Zia is the author of Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2000), which was a finalist for the prestigious 2000 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. President Bill Clinton quoted from Asian American Dreams at two separate speeches in the Rose Garden. She is also coauthor, with Dr. Wen Ho Lee, of My Country Versus Me, (Hyperion, 2002). Their book reveals what happened to the Los Alamos scientist who was falsely accused of being a spy for China in the “worst case since the Rosenbergs.”

Zia is an award-winning journalist and a Contributing Editor to Ms. Magazine, where she was formerly Executive Editor. Her articles, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including Ms., New York Times, Washington Post, The Nation, Essence, OUT!, Social Policy, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She has contributed essays to several book anthologies, including Asian American Almanac; Making Waves; Ending Domestic Violence: The Global Frontlines; Report from Beijing: Journalists of Color at the Fourth World Conference on Women; The Price We Pay: The Case Against Racist Speech, Hate Violence and Pornography; and The Readers Companion to U.S. Women’s History.

For more than two decades, Zia has been a magazine writer and editor. She traveled to Beijing in 1995 to the UN Fourth World Congress on Women as part of a journalists of color delegation. In 2001, she was named one of the most influential Asian Americans of the decade by A. Magazine. She has received numerous journalism awards for her ground-breaking stories; her investigation of date rape at the University of Michigan led to campus demonstrations and an administrative overhaul of its policies, while her research on women who join neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations provoked new thinking on the relationship between race and gender violence in hate crimes.

A second generation Chinese American, Zia has been outspoken on issues ranging from civil rights and peace to women’s rights and countering hate violence. Her work on the Asian American landmark civil rights case of anti-Asian violence is documented in the Academy Award nominated film, “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” In 1997 she testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on the impact of the campaign finance hearings on Asian Americans, and helped author a complaint to the Commission against Congress, the Democratic and Republican National Committees and the news media for their racially discriminatory treatment of Asian Americans.

Zia received an honorary doctorate from the Law School of the City University of New York in 2002 for bringing important matters of law and civil rights into public view. She is a graduate of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where she was a Woodrow Wilson Scholar and a member of the university’s first graduating class of women. She quit medical school after completing two years, then went to work as a construction laborer, an autoworker, and a community organizer, after which she discovered her life’s work as a writer.