Ray Hsu is a Ph.D. candidate in English literary studies at the  University of Wisconsin-Madison. His areas of research include twentieth century American Literature, American Studies, and cultural theory. Ray is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia.

His dissertation, "Knowledge Economies: Funding Structures and  Literary Ethnography in the United States, 1926-1943," examines how  funding—philanthropic, corporate, and state- bureaucratic—produces  works on the border between fiction and ethnography. This project is  supported by a University Dissertator Fellowship, Vilas Travel  Fellowships, and an Elaine Marks Fellowship.

Ray's first book of poems, Anthropy, won the League of Canadian  Poets' Gerald Lampert Award and was a finalist for the Trillium Book  Award for Poetry. He has published poems in literary journals  including The Walrus, New American Writing, and Fence.

He received a HEX Evjue Research Award for his work in a prison  establishing a creative writing workshop and an essay-writing  tutorial program for General Educational Development (GED) and High- School Equivalency Diploma (HSED). He was recently featured on the  Book Television and Bravo! documentary series Heart of a Poet.