Helen Zia is a writer, activist and Fulbright Scholar and is outspoken on issues ranging from human rights to countering gender and hate violence and homophobia. Her latest book, Last Boat out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese who Fled Mao’s Revolution, was an NPR best book of 2019 and shortlisted for a 2020 national PEN AMERICA award. Her other books include Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, about the contemporary civil rights struggles of Asian Americans; and My Country Versus Me, which described how racial profiling was used to wrongly accuse and imprison Wen Ho Lee, the Chinese American physicist who the New York Times called the “worst spy since the Rosenbergs.”

The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Helen was born and raised in New Jersey during the civil rights, anti-war and women’s movements, which she was eager to be part of. Later, as she worked as a magazine editor and journalist, her special passion involved stories of ordinary people in pursuit of social change and justice. She was the Executive Editor of Ms. Magazine, where she received numerous journalism awards. 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 neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations sparked new thinking on the relationship between race and gender in hate violence. In April 2023, she founded the Vincent Chin Institute to build solidarity against hate (vincentchin.org) and authored of the Vincent Chin Legacy Guide: Asian Americans and Civil Rights, available free in several languages.

Helen testified before the Commission on Civil Rights about racially discriminatory portrayals in the news media. Her work on the Asian American landmark civil rights case of anti-Asian violence is documented in the Oscar-nominated film, “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” In 2010, Helen became a witness in the federal case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that made marriage equality the law of the land. She holds honorary doctorates from the University of San Francisco and the City University of New York Law School. She attended Princeton University on a full scholarship and was a member of its first graduating class of women. Helen quit medical school to work as a construction laborer, an autoworker, and a community organizer, until she discovered her life’s work as a journalist and writer.