Maria Nguyễn is a Vietnamese American novelist and former investigative features reporter. Raised in Garden Grove, California, she studied environmental science at UC Davis and earned an M.A. in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. For nearly a decade she covered chemical safety, energy, and water policy along the Gulf Coast, with bylines in Texas Monthly, The Atlantic, and High Country News; her reporting garnered regional press honors and a national science-writing citation for work on refinery accidents in Port Arthur.
Her fiction ranges from propulsive thrillers to contemporary novels of community, labor, and love, braiding industrial landscapes with intimate suspense. She is the author of the short story collection Salt-Bright, the novel Faultline Motel (longlisted for the Strand Critics Award), and the thriller Scraping the Barrel. Maria Nguyễn lives in Houston with her partner and an elderly blue heeler, and she teaches narrative nonfiction workshops at Rice University.
