In 2021, in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, Vanessa Hua witnessed something unusual in her Bay Area neighborhood. “There was a coyote running down the street—being chased by two deer,” she says via Zoom from her home office, which is in the house she grew up in during the 1980s and ’90s. “I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was like, has the world gone totally off-kilter? It could be a sign of nature healing, or that things had gone deeply off-balance.”

The moment sparked the idea for her latest book, Coyoteland, set to publish in May from Flatiron. The novel follows four very different families in the close-knit but fraught El Nido neighborhood in the hills east of Berkeley, Calif., during the pandemic, as a sequence of shocking incidents—including coyote attacks—rocks their community.

“It was right after a summer of protests against police brutality, and we were at a real inflection point. There was hope that the change could be for the better,” Hua says. “But then we saw the pendulum swing in the other direction with book bans, the anti-trans bill, the cancellation of DEI programs. I think what this book reflects is that there’s still a will to survive, to resist, to fight, to make a better life for your children. We all want that. But maybe we are still asking the questions: How do we get along with our neighbors in times that are so divided? How can we live in community? How can we be good neighbors?”

These are questions Hua has been wrestling with since she first started writing, way back in elementary school. She grew up the middle child of a structural engineer dad and a research scientist mom, both of Taiwanese descent, who settled in the East Bay area in the 1970s. Hua describes herself as “a very curious child” and a voracious reader from the start, making friends with Laura Ingalls, Anne Shirley, and Jo March as a child—all “spirited young girls who became writers.”

By fourth grade, Hua recalls receiving a “genius writer award” from her teacher. It made an impression. “I still have it,” she says. “I have this Garfield notebook full of stories. It even had a title page with a logo.”

Hua wrote throughout high school and studied English with an emphasis on creative writing at Stanford, graduating with both her BA and MA in media studies in 1997. While there, she started writing for the school paper and cut her teeth as a cub reporter at the Los Angeles Times, where she worked in the Minority Editorial Training Program, and then at the Hartford Courant in Connecticut. “I loved being able to follow my curiosity out into the world,” she says. “Just getting out there and asking questions.”

By 1999, Hua had moved back to the Bay Area and started writing for the San Francisco Examiner, covering immigrant and diaspora communities and technology. “It was right when the dot-com boom was taking off, so I covered digital culture a lot,” she says. “I convinced them to send me to Burning Man.”

All the while, she was still writing short stories and working with writers’ groups because the dream of being a fiction writer still lingered. “I realized to make it happen I’d have to dedicate myself to creative writing,” she says, “in a much more meaningful way.”

In 2007, as journalism was rapidly becoming what she calls “a burning building sliding off a cliff,” Hua took a buyout and got
a full ride to the MFA creative writing program at UC Riverside, graduating in 2009. She then moved back to the Bay Area again, joined the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, and found a community. “People here just show up for each other,” she says. “Together, we
celebrate and commiserate. I definitely have writer friends I call and say, ‘I’m not fishing for compliments, but please help me feel better about my life choices today.’ ”

In 2016, she started writing a long-running column for the San Francisco Chronicle and published a short story collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities. She followed this up with A River of Stars (2018), which she describes as “if Thelma and Louise were pregnant in the 1960s, and didn’t drive off that cliff.” She began the book while pregnant with twins, who are now in their teens. “It started as a short story, but it felt unfinished, like it was just tugging at me,” she says.

After that came Forbidden City (2022), a Northern California Book Award–nominated coming-of-age story that follows a 15-year-old peasant girl through the Cultural Revolution in China as she becomes a protégée and lover of Chairman Mao. “I had interviewed this couple in San Francisco who lived through the Cultural Revolution,” Lau says. “That granny racing down the street in Chinatown—you never know how many lives she may have lived.”

In Coyoteland, Hua deftly explores questions of race and class as tensions rise in El Nido amid the pandemic. White and well-off Blair Belle prickles when Jin Chang and his family move in next door with plans to flip the house, which will jeopardize her real estate investments. Meanwhile, Blair sends her housekeeper to spy on her daughter’s swim team rival. And Jin’s daughter Jane develops a friendship with Tasha—one of the only Black girls at school—and the pair plans to expose the neighborhood’s scandals as raging wildfires threaten to burn everything down.

As she prepares for Coyoteland’s publication, Hua is already wrapping up her next book: a personal narrative about
her own journey as a forager, which began as a pandemic pastime. She says the experience of learning to identify plants, and how to use them in everyday life, has brought her closer to her roots in many ways. Living in her hometown, “it’s a familiar landscape, but I’ve got to know it in a different way,” she says. “It shapes my consideration of time, of cycles, of seasons. So the book is about foraging, but it’s also about the natural world, about midlife, about caregiving.”

Many of those ideas are also woven into Coyoteland. “It’s about resilience,” she explains. “And joy. And embracing our landscape, even if it’s running a little wild. The question for me is, What kind of neighbors are we going to be? To each other? To wildlife? It feels like we’re all so busy claiming our territory.”

Hua says she hopes Coyoteland will find the right readers, just like the books she discovered when she was a kid with a pen and a notebook. “I always talk to younger writers, and they ask what success looks like as a writer,” she says. “For me, it’s always the hope, you know, that your books reach someone at exactly the time they needed it in their life and that it can open the way for more.”

Sona Charaipotra is a journalist, an editor, and the author of six books.