Lan Samantha Chang is a highly acclaimed literary fiction author, best known for her novel "The Family Chao." She was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, and attended Yale University where she earned her bachelor's degree in East Asian Studies. Chang then worked in publishing in New York City briefly before getting her MPA from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford. Currently, she is the Elizabeth M. Stanley Professor in the Arts at the University of Iowa and the Director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, making her the first woman and the first Asian American to hold that position.
Chang's first book, "Hunger," is a novella and short story collection published in 1998. The stories are set in the US and China and explore themes of home, family, and loss. The New York Times Book Review called it "Elegant" and "a delicately calculated balance sheet of the losses and gains of immigrants whose lives are stretched between two radically different cultures." The Washington Post described it as "a work of gorgeous, enduring prose." Chang's first novel, "Inheritance," was published in 2004 and tells the story of a family torn apart by the Japanese invasion during World War II. Her latest novel, "All Is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost," was published in 2011 and follows two poets and their friendship as they explore the depths and costs of making art. The book received a starred review from Booklist and praise for its exploration of the loneliness of artistic endeavor. Chang's fourth book and third novel, "The Family Chao," is forthcoming in 2022.
Chang has received numerous fellowships, including those from MacDowell, the American Library in Paris, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the National Endowment for the Arts. As the Director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has been instrumental in increasing racial, cultural, and aesthetic diversity within the program and has mentored a number of emerging writers. In 2019, she received the Michael J. Brody Award and the Regents' Award for Excellence from the University of Iowa.