Summary
Stephen Shu-Ning Liu was born in Fuling, China, near the Yangtze River, on March 16, 1930, the son of a hermetic painter and the grandson of a Mandarin scholar who taught him Chinese classics. After graduation from Nanjing University in 1948 and military service in the Chinese Expeditionary Army, he came to San Francisco in 1952. After earning a Ph.D.. in English from the University of North Dakota in 1973, Liu was an English professor at the Community College of Southern Nevada in Las Vegas until his retirement in 2001. Liu's poetry has been published internationally, in both Chinese and English, in many literary magazines, anthologies and college texts. He was the first Nevadan to receive a Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts (1981-82) and won a Pushcart Prize for poetry 1982. In 1985, he won the Nevada Governor's Award for Literature. The editor of Desert Wood: An Anthology of Nevada Poets, Shaun T. Griffin, noted, "Liu's poetry is refreshingly candid, dramatic and rooted in the lyrical history of his Chinese heritage...He is surely one of the finest Chinese poets writing in English today."