Born and raised in Việt Nam, Dr. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai (pronounced ŋwiən fα:n kwey mai) is the author of the international best-seller The Mountains Sing, which won multiple literary awards including Runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the 2021 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the 2021 Nota Bene Prize, the 2020 BookBrowse Best Debut Award and the Lannan Literary Fellowship in Fiction. She has published twelve books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in Vietnamese and English. Her writing has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in major publications including The New York Times. Her new novel Dust Child has been selected a best book of 2023 by Reader's Digest, Cosmopolitan, the Buzz Magazines, and Book Riot. It has also been featured as a best Book of March/Spring 2023 by the Los Angeles Times, Amazon, Library Journal, the Chicago Review of Books, Ms. Magazine, BookPage, The Times, The Australian Women's Weekly, Sydney Morning Herald, and Apple Books. It has also been voted by booksellers around the U.S. as an Indie Next Great Read. Quế Mai has a PhD in Creative Writing and was named by Forbes Vietnam as one of 20 inspiring women of 2021. 

Quế Mai is passionate about empowering others. She is the Peace Ambassador for PeaceTree Vietnam, an organization that works to remove unexploded bombs in Việt Nam, the Author Advocate for Room to Read, an organisation that aims to erase global illiteracy and promotes girls’ education, an editor of DVAN's publishing series, a non-profilt which publishes books to fight against misrepresentation, the Advisor for Stories of Vietnam, a project that publishes and distributes free children books in Vietnamese and English, and the Ambassador for ShelterBox Bookclub, a UK charity book club which has raised £1 million to provide emergency shelter for families across the world after disasters. She is also an executive producer of "Intersections," a documentary series about mixed race children born out of the Việt Nam War, directed by Kirk Kellerhals, which recently won Best Inspirational Film Award at the 2022 Cannes World Film Festival.