Gish Jen

Gish Jen, a prominent Asian American author, had to walk a long and strenuous road to pursue her career as a writer. Despite her family's insistence that she pursue "a more practical career," Jen followed that which she knew best and has established herself as a well respected, highly acclaimed contemporary writer.

Her book Typical American was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award. It inspired Richard Eder of The Los Angeles Times to say, "Jen has done much more than tell an immigrant story. She has done it more, and in some ways better, than it has ever been done before." Jackie Jones of The San Francisco Chronicle claimed, "Gish Jen has secured her place in American Literature with this touching tale." Jen continues to untangle issues of identity and self discovery in her latest novel, World and Town, which follows a woman trying to start her life over after losing two loved ones to cancer.

Her second novel, Mona in the Promised Land, was also a New York Times Notable Book. The Los Angeles Times named it "one of the ten best books of 1996." Cynthia Ozick described it as "a light-hearted novel of radiant charm and human warmth;" Amy Tan called it "hilariously funny and seriously important;" and Dan Cryer of Newsday hailed it as proof that "Gish Jen is here to stay, a literary force worthy of attention and respect." Who's Irish continues to receive rave reviews, with one critic noting, "one of the greatest charms of Gish Jen's fiction is her position as a bemused chronicler of the way things are in this crazy mishmash of an America, of the power and the limitations of family roots, and of the hugely comic potential in human nature."

Jen has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. Her short fiction has appeared in a host of textbooks and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories 1988 and 1995, The Heath Anthology of American Literature, The Bedford Introduction to Literature, and Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. She was featured in the PBS Masterworks series, The American Novel.

Jen has been awarded fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, Fulbright, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a former senior fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, and currently teaches creative writing at Harvard University. Jen was also honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters with a Strauss Living, the most lucrative literary honor in the United States.

She received her undergraduate degree in English from Harvard University in 1977, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1983.