She won the 2011 National Book Award for Young People's Literature[1][2] and a Newbery Honor[3] for her debut novel, Inside Out & Back Again, which was published by HarperCollins.
She then moved to Alabama and graduated from University of Texas, Austin with a degree in journalism in 1988, and worked for about two years for the Orange County, California newspaper The Register, covering news about Little Saigon, the local Vietnamese community.
Hà and her family flee home and meet America's "sharp-edged barriers of color, ethnicity, religion, and custom.
In her own words it was "third-person omniscient, spanning 4000 years of Vietnamese history, and whiplashed by hundreds of overly dramatic, showy sentences."
A review by "especially poignant as she cycles from feeling smart in Vietnam to struggling in the States, and finally regains academic and social confidence.