My latest essay has been published in hardcopy. It is about writing and running, and it appears in the Montgomery County Road Runners Club newsletter, Intervals.

Here is the PDF.

You may reach me at frankhwu [it must have my middle initial, or it’s an irate guy in Hong Kong] @mac.com.

I was born in America in 1967, and I grew up in Detroit. My wife, Carol Izumi, and I now split our time between San Francisco and Washington, D.C. (I have to check on my father, who lives alone at 90 just beyond the Beltway.) Our little dog, Bebe, goes everywhere with us. She was preceded by Buster and Ding Ding, both rescue mutts.

I am writing and running and taking photos. I hope to do another book, to follow Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, which came out more than a quarter century ago. In retirement, I spend considerable time in the library. I was a writer with a day job before. I’m a writer now. I am re-reading Montaigne. I try to write 2500 words per day in my journal. As a vanity project, I am publishing for private distribution movie reviews originally posted to Letterboxd under a pen name; there are five volumes of four hundred pages each ready, with another five volumes planned. I have done an estimated 300 half marathons since starting in 2014, and I am out almost every weekend on trails. Last Saturday as of this writing, I did the Double Dipsea, with 4200 feet vertical gain, and I was not the DFL finisher. I have been enjoying film cameras, primarily a pair of vintage Contax G2s. I typically shoot Ilford HP5 pushed two stops.

In 2018, I had a significant health crisis. After months of errors, I was diagnosed with pemphigus vulgaris, a rare autoimmune condition that was 90% fatal before modern steroids — those didn’t work for me. I was on heavy doses of methotrexate and prednisone, which made me a drowsy paranoid. But the FDA approved monoclonal antibody infusions shortly after the specialists figured out my condition. I received Rituximab infusions, among the first cohort. I credit UCSF.

Earlier in life, I was an avid motorcyclist. I still have my 1990 Honda Hawk GT, a 650cc V-Twin ahead of its time, with a Two Brothers custom exhaust (and corresponding engine modifications), but I gave away my BMW K1200RS, to charity, painted bright yellow and named “Peril.” I also am a theatergoer and jazz fan. I “completed” Shakespeare twice, having had to add Edward III after it was acknowledged as likely canonical. I used to patronize Jazz Standard before they closed during the pandemic.

Frank H. Wu retired in 2026 as President of Queens College.

Prior to joining the City University of New York (CUNY) system, Frank served as Chancellor & Dean, and then William L. Prosser Distinguished Professor at the institution now known as UC College of the Law, San Francisco, a unique standalone institution, the original law school of the UC system. Before joining UC Law San Francisco, he was a member of the faculty at Howard University, the nation’s leading historically black college/university (HBCU), for a decade. He served as Dean of Wayne State University Law School in his hometown of Detroit, and he has been a visiting professor at University of Michigan; an adjunct professor at Columbia University; and a Thomas C. Grey Teaching Fellow at Stanford University. He taught at the Peking University School of Transnational Law in its inaugural year and again a decade later, and at Johns Hopkins University twice. In his leadership roles at Queens College, UC Law San Francisco and Wayne, as well as on the faculty at Howard, he was the first Asian American to serve in such a capacity. In recognition of his leadership, he was selected for the Chang-Lin Tien Award in 2008 and the APAHE (Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Education) CEO Award in 2024.

Frank is dedicated to civic engagement and civil rights. He was appointed by the federal Department of Education during the Obama administration to its National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), which advises the administration on higher education accreditation, serving for nine years, including as Vice-Chair; and by the Defense Department to the Military Leadership Diversity Commission (one of two civilians), which submitted to Congress the report From Representation to Inclusion, recommending elimination of the combat exclusion based on gender. He was a Trustee of Gallaudet University, the only university in the world dedicated to deaf and hard of hearing persons, from 2000 to 2010, and Vice-Chair for the final four years of his tenure. He was a Trustee of Deep Springs College, a highly-selective full-scholarship school enrolling twenty-six on a student-run cattle ranch near Death Valley, where he previously taught for several short periods; he served nine years, during the transition to co-education. In April 2016, he was elected by the members of Committee of 100 as their Chair, and he held that office for two years; then in February 2017, the Board named him as the group’s first-ever President, a role he held for two and a half years. He served on the Board of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund from 2004 to 2010. When he was Chair of the Washington, D.C. Human Rights Commission, the body ruled under local law that organizations could not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. He also worked full-time pro bono on behalf of undocumented immigrants in the vote on California Proposition 187 and was an expert witness for student-intervenors supporting diversity in the University of Michigan affirmative action cases. For his advocacy work, he received the John Hope Franklin Award in 2020.

Frank is the author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, which was immediately reprinted in its hardcover edition, and co-author of Race, Rights and Reparation: Law and the Japanese American Internment, which received the single greatest grant from the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund. He blogged regularly for six years at Huffington Post; and had a regular column in The Daily Journal, the legal newspaper of California. His work has appeared in The New York Times and Washington Post. He has appeared as a guest on the Oprah Winfrey show, O’Reilly Factor, and C-SPAN Booknotes with Brian Lamb.

Prior to his academic career, he held a clerkship with the late U.S. District Judge Frank J. Battisti in Cleveland and practiced law with the firm of Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco – while there, he devoted a quarter of his time to pro bono work on behalf of indigent clients. He received a B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University and a J.D. with honors from the University of Michigan. He completed the Management Development Program of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Frank was born in the United States in 1967. He is married to Carol L. Izumi.