Lan Samantha Chang
Lan Samantha Chang was born in Appleton, Wisconsin and attended college at Yale where she earned her bachelor's degree in East Asian Studies. She 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. She is currently the Elizabeth M. Stanley Professor in the Arts at the University of Iowa and the Director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the first woman, and the first Asian American, to hold that position.
Chang's first book is a novella and short stories, titled Hunger (1998). The stories are set in the US and China, and they explore home, family, and loss. The New York Times Book Review called it "Elegant.… A delicately calculated balance sheet of the losses and gains of immigrants whose lives are stretched between two radically different cultures." The Washington Post called it "A work of gorgeous, enduring prose." Her first novel, Inheritance (2004), is about a family torn apart by the Japanese invasion during World War II. The Boston Globe said: "The story…is foreign in its historical sweep and social detail but universal in its emotional truth." Chang's latest novel, All Is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost (2011), 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: "Among the many threads Chang elegantly pursues—the fraught relationships between mentors and students, the value of poetry, the price of ambition—it is her indelible portrait of the loneliness of artistic endeavor that will haunt readers the most in this exquisitely written novel about the poet’s lot." Chang's fourth book and third novel, The Family Chao, is forthcoming in 2022.
Chang has received fellowships 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 fifth director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Chang has been fundamental to the increase of 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.
Website: https://lansamanthachang.com/
“Who would one rather be? The one who desires, or the object of desire? One's answer to this question might determine if he is meant to be a poet or something else entirely.”
“The people who matter the most to us in the end, who teach us the most, are the people who make their worst mistakes with us.”
“She'll be an excellent novelist: a monster of self-absorption.”
“Inadequate love is love. Unrequited love is love.”
“Haven't we all, as time continues, found that we must be kind to ourselves and listen to our thoughts, because fewer and fewer of those remain who know what is most real to us?”
“For it is through humility, he knew, that holiness--and poetry--find entrance to the human soul.”
“If I could change a single thing about my life,' she said gently, 'I would not have been so unhappy when I was young.”
“For each of us, he understood, is born into our own time and eventually the things we held as the center of our world, dearly, unforgivingly, must fade.”