Oanh Ngo Usadi

Oanh Ngo Usadi was born in Saì Gòn but grew up in an orchard in the Mekong Delta, where her family was exiled after the war. When she was eleven, the family escaped Việt Nam as part of the mass exodus of boat refugees. In 1984, they settled in a small Texas town where her father, the eternal entrepreneur, opened a bánh mì sandwich shop.

After working in consulting and having her own personal chef business, Oanh turned to writing. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Forbes, and elsewhere.

She has been featured in several podcasts including Voice of America, the Bookmonger, and Morphmom. She has also been a featured storyteller at The Moth Mainstage.

You can follow Oanh on Facebook, Twitter and the O&O Press w

If you like author Oanh Ngo Usadi here is the list of authors you may also like

Buy books on Amazon

Total similar authors (23)

Cinda Adams Brooks

Cinda grew up with her identical twin, Linda, and three brothers in East Africa where their parents served as medical missionaries. Her nursing, health education, and law enforcement careers combined for a rich twenty-year career teaching fitness, wellness, defensive tactics, and survival at the Texas Game Warden Training Academy. She currently pursues her mission -- to unleash the champion in people -- through her volunteer work in the Discovery Program and her connections with people that cross her path.

Cinda lives near Austin, Texas, with her husband, Stanley, and Rhodesian ridgeback puppy, Buddy. Among her interests are travel and competitive sports. She is a gold medalist in the World Police and Fire Games in biathlon (running and pist
Buy books on Amazon
Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist.

Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from John Burroughs School. She obtained a A.B. at Vassar College, then earned a M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. While working towards her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar. From 1981 to 1996, she taught at Iowa State University. Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, and won a 1985 O. Henry Award for her short story "Lily", which was published in The Atlantic Monthly. Her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992.
Buy books on Amazon
Anna Quindlen

Anna Marie Quindlen is an American author, journalist, and opinion columnist.
Her New York Times column, Public and Private, won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992. She began her journalism career in 1974 as a reporter for the New York Post. Between 1977 and 1994 she held several posts at The New York Times. Her semi-autobiographical novel One True Thing (1994) served as the basis for the 1998 film starring Meryl Streep and Renée Zellweger.

Buy books on Amazon
Ruth Reichl

Ruth Reichl is the New York Times bestselling author of five memoirs, the novels Delicious! and The Paris Novel, and the cookbook My Kitchen Year. She was editor in chief of Gourmet magazine, and previously served as restaurant critic for The New York Times, as well as food editor and restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times. She has been honored with six James Beard Awards.
Buy books on Amazon
Andre Dubus III

Andre Dubus III is the author of The Garden of Last Days, House of Sand and Fog (a #1 New York Times bestseller, Oprah’s Book Club pick, and finalist for the National Book Award) and Townie, winner of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His writing has received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Magazine Award, and two Pushcart Prizes. He lives with his family north of Boston.
Buy books on Amazon
Octavia E. Butler

Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field. She won both Hugo and Nebula awards. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant.

After her father died, Butler was raised by her widowed mother. Extremely shy as a child, Octavia found an outlet at the library reading fantasy, and in writing. She began writing science fiction as a teenager. She attended community college during the Black Power movement, and while participating in a local writer's workshop was encouraged to attend the Clarion Workshop, which focused on science fiction.

She soon sold her first stories and by the late 1970s had become
Buy books on Amazon
Susan Meissner

Susan Meissner is a USA Today bestselling novelist with more than a million books in the hands of readers, and in eighteen languages. Her critically acclaimed works of historical fiction have been named to numerous lists including Publishers Weekly’s annual roster of 100 best books, Library Reads Top Picks, Real Simple annual tally of best books, Goodreads Readers’ Choice awards, Booklist’s Top Ten, and Book of the Month.

She attended Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego and is a former managing editor of a weekly newspaper. Susan’s expertise as a storyteller and her thoroughly researched topics make her a favorite author of book clubs everywhere. Her engaging and warm speaking style appeal to all manner of women’s groups, literary o
Buy books on Amazon
Jim DeFede

Jim DeFede joined CBS News Miami in January 2006 and serves as an investigative reporter for the station, as well as a host of its Sunday morning public affairs program "Facing South Florida."
Buy books on Amazon
Elin Hilderbrand

Elin Hilderbrand lives on Nantucket with her husband and their three young children. She grew up in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, and traveled extensively before settling on Nantucket, which has been the setting for her five previous novels. Hilderbrand is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and the graduate fiction workshop at the University of Iowa.

Facebook.com/ElinHilderbrand

Pinterest.com/ElinHilderbrand
Buy books on Amazon
Eric Puchner

Eric Puchner is the author of the novel Model Home (Scribner, 2010), which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won a California Book Award and a Barnes & Noble Discover Award (2nd place). It was also longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His debut short story collection, Music Through the Floor (Scribner, 2005), was a finalist for the NY Public Library's Young Lions Award.

His fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in GQ, Tin House, Zoetrope: All Story, Chicago Tribune, The Sun, Glimmer Train, Best New American Voices, and many other journals and anthologies. He has work forthcoming in Best American Short Stories 2012 (edited by tom Perrotta) and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012 (edited by Dave
Buy books on Amazon
Chris Dolley

New York Times bestselling author, pioneer computer game designer and teenage freedom fighter. That was back in 1974 when Chris was tasked with publicising Plymouth’s Student Rag Week. Some people might have arranged an interview with the local newspaper. Chris invaded the country next door, created the Free Cornish Army and persuaded the UK media that Cornwall had risen up and declared independence. This was later written up in Punch. As he told journalists at the time, ‘it was only a small country and I did give it back.’

In 1981, he created Randomberry Games and wrote Necromancer, one of the first 3D first person perspective D&D computer games. Not to mention writing the most aggressive chess program ever seen and inventing the most dang
Buy books on Amazon
Lisa Genova

Lisa Genova graduated valedictorian, summa cum laude from Bates College with a degree in Biopsychology and has a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Harvard University.

Acclaimed as the Oliver Sacks of fiction and the Michael Crichton of brain science, Lisa has captured a special place in contemporary fiction, writing stories that are equally inspired by neurological conditions and our shared human condition. She is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels STILL ALICE, LEFT NEGLECTED, LOVE ANTHONY, INSIDE THE O'BRIENS, and EVERY NOTE PLAYED.

Her first work of nonfiction, REMEMBER: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting, published March 2021, became an instant New York Times bestseller.

STILL ALICE was adapted into a film starrin
Buy books on Amazon
Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the New York Times bestselling author most recently TAKE MY HAND (2022). Take My Hand was awarded the 2023 NAACP Image Award for Literary Work-Fiction and the BCALA Fiction Award. It was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 in Newsweek, San Francisco Chronicle, Essence, NBC News, and elsewhere, and it was an IndieNext and LibraryReads pick for April 2022. The Washington Post called it "a jewel of a book." Her other novels include Wench (2010) and Balm (2015).

Dolen has established herself as a pre-eminent chronicler of American historical life. In 2017, HarperCollins released her first novel Wench as one of eight "Olive Titles," limited edition modern classics that included books by Edward P. Jones, Louise Erdrich, a
Buy books on Amazon
Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Shilpi Somaya Gowda is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of four novels: Secret Daughter (2010), The Golden Son (2015), The Shape of Family (2020), and A Great Country (2024). Her novels have been translated into over 30 languages, been #1 international bestsellers in several countries and sold more than two million copies worldwide.

Shilpi was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. She spent a college summer as a volunteer in an Indian orphanage, which seeded the idea for her first novel and the transition from a business career to a becoming a writer: Secret Daughter was an IndieNext Great Read, a Target Book Club Pick, an Indigo Heather’s Pick, and an Amnesty International Book Club Pick. It was a finalist for the South A
Buy books on Amazon
Rebecca Makkai

Rebecca Makkai is the author of 2023's New York Times bestselling I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU, as well as the novels THE GREAT BELIEVERS, THE BORROWER and THE HUNDRED-YEAR HOUSE, and the collection MUSIC FOR WARTIME. THE GREAT BELIEVERS was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize among other honors,

A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca teaches graduate fiction writing at Northwestern University, UNR Tahoe, and Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English; and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago. She lives in Chicago and Vermont. Visit her at RebeccaMakkai.com or on twitter@rebeccamakkai.
Buy books on Amazon
Hyeonseo Lee

"Hyeonseo Lee brought the human consequences of global inaction on North Korea to the world's doorstep.... Against all odds she escaped, survived, and had the courage to speak out."

--Samantha Power, U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations
Buy books on Amazon
Dawn Fallon

I was born in Birmingham to working-class parents in 1959. I worked hard at my music studies and obtained a music degree, graduating in 1980. I joined the Civil Service in January 1981 as a Clerical Officer, eventually gaining a promotion to work as a VAT Control Officer. I currently live in Devon and am a hotel pianist.
Buy books on Amazon
Cinda Adams Brooks

Cinda grew up with her identical twin, Linda, and three brothers in East Africa where their parents served as medical missionaries. Her nursing, health education, and law enforcement careers combined for a rich twenty-year career teaching fitness, wellness, defensive tactics, and survival at the Texas Game Warden Training Academy. She currently pursues her mission -- to unleash the champion in people -- through her volunteer work in the Discovery Program and her connections with people that cross her path.

Cinda lives near Austin, Texas, with her husband, Stanley, and Rhodesian ridgeback puppy, Buddy. Among her interests are travel and competitive sports. She is a gold medalist in the World Police and Fire Games in biathlon (running and pist
Buy books on Amazon
Christopher Shaffer

Christopher Shaffer is Dean of Library Services at Troy University. A former history teacher, he taught in Slovakia in the first months after it became an independent nation in 1993, and also returned there for another teaching stint in 1996. Lessons learned in Slovakia, as well as from travels throughout Eastern Europe influenced his work both as a teacher and a librarian. Shaffer currently resides in Enterprise, Alabama, with his wife Amber and their two dogs—“the Girls”—Dolly and Molly.
Buy books on Amazon
Samuel Burr

Samuel Burr is a TV producer who has worked on popular factual shows including the BAFTA-nominated Secret Life of 4-Year-Olds. Samuel’s writing was selected for Penguin’s WriteNow scheme and in 2021 he graduated from the Faber Academy. He previously studied at Westminster Film School.
Buy books on Amazon
Libo Cao Meyers

Libo Cao Meyers is an accomplished engineering executive who has been with Apple since 2011. With a passion for enriching people’s lives, she serves on multiple boards and is dedicated to creating innovative products and meaningful services that help individuals reach their full potential.

Despite being diagnosed with polio as an infant while growing up in rural parts of Northern China, Libo Cao Meyers refused to let her disability hold her back. At the age of twenty-four, she immigrated alone to the United States and achieved an incredible feat by completing her MS and Ph.D. simultaneously in two different engineering fields from Ohio University within four years. Her tech profession began in Silicon Valley in early 2004, where she has thr
Buy books on Amazon
Lori Jones

Lori Jones personally experienced the effects of Huntington’s Disease (HD) in her family and was instrumental in starting Team Hope Fox Valley events to raise awareness and support for research and community programs through the Huntington’s Disease Society of America (HDSA) – Wisconsin Chapter.

A storyteller at heart, she regularly writes and speaks about her experiences with HD and many other topics to groups of all ages.

Lori has three adult children and lives with her husband Chris in Wisconsin, when they aren’t escaping to their cottage in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to enjoy kayaking, hiking, and campfires.

This is her first book.
Buy books on Amazon
Libo Cao Meyers

Libo Cao Meyers is an accomplished engineering executive who has been with Apple since 2011. With a passion for enriching people’s lives, she serves on multiple boards and is dedicated to creating innovative products and meaningful services that help individuals reach their full potential.

Despite being diagnosed with polio as an infant while growing up in rural parts of Northern China, Libo Cao Meyers refused to let her disability hold her back. At the age of twenty-four, she immigrated alone to the United States and achieved an incredible feat by completing her MS and Ph.D. simultaneously in two different engineering fields from Ohio University within four years. Her tech profession began in Silicon Valley in early 2004, where she has thr
Buy books on Amazon