About Mai-Lon Gittelsohn

Author of:

Chop Suey and Apple Pie

Mai-Lon Gittelsohn was a Del Mar school teacher for over twenty years. Upon retirement, she taught memoir writing for seniors for over a decade.

In 2012 she received her MFA in Creative Writing from Oregon’s Pacific University with a focus on poetry. Her chapbook “Chop Suey and Apple Pie” was entered in the New Women’s Voices chapbook contest in 2013 and published in 2014 by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in the San Diego Poetry Annual, Patterson Literary Review, Hummingbird Review, the Magee Park Poets Anthology, the Raven Chronicles and The Second Genesis, an anthology of contemporary world poetry.

Mai-Lon is passionate about the performing arts. She attended the East West Players Summer Conservatory in 2004. A voice and acting student, she has acted in and directed plays for Theatre World in the Osher Program at UCSD. She has sung with Villa Musica’s Project Cabaret and helped to organize a local cabaret group in 2023.

My Book

Mai-lon’s Journey

A book of wonderful poems about growing up in Berkeley as the fifth daughter of a Chinese-American family.

San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1940’s

In its heyday, there were six nightclubs with all-Asian floorshows in San Francisco, catering to a mostly white clientele with names to capitalize on their exoticism: The Dragon’s Lair, The Lion’s Den, Kubla Khan, The Chinese Sky Room, Club Shanghai. The most famous of all was Forbidden City.

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Flowing through eight decades, from the vivid black robes emboldened with golden dragons and worn by a long dead-dead cousin in Chinese Opera, to the ostrich-feathered arms of the final phantom and friend, this first collection of poems by Mai-Lon Gittelsohn is rich sexy, loving and humane