Ninety-Nine Fire Hoops: A Memoir

Allison Hong Merrill was born and raised in Taiwan and arrived in the US at age twenty-two as a university student. That's when she realized her school English wasn't much help when asking for directions on the street or opening a bank account. She eventually learned English well enough to earn an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, however, and she now writes in both Chinese and English, both fiction and creative nonfiction, which means she spends a lot of time looking up words at Dictionary.com. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the Grand Prize winner of the 2019 MAST People of Earth writing contest. She is also the inaugural winner of Sandra Carpenter Prize for Creative Nonfiction, first-place winner of the 2019 Segullah Journal writing contest, first-place winner of 2020 Opossum flash prose contest, the runner-up in the 2020 Q2 Women on Writing Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest, and the third-place winner in the Storymakers Contest. Her work can be found in the Life Story Anthology and Liahona Magazine (both based in Taipei, Taiwan), Ensign Magazine, Flying South Literary Magazine, Dialogue Journal, Motherscope Magazine, Past-Ten Journal, Cosmonauts Avenue, and LDS Beta Reader Mind Game Anthology. Allison lives in Orem, Utah with her husband and their three sons.