Lan Samantha Chang

American fiction writer

Lan Samantha Chang (Chinese: 張嵐; pinyin: Zhāng Lán) is an American novelist and short story writer. She is the author of The Family Chao (2022) and short story collection Hunger. For her fiction, which explores Chinese American experiences, she is a recipient of the Anisfield Wolf Book Award, the Berlin Prize, the PEN/Open Book Award and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. She is 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 the position.

Lan Samantha Chang was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, and attended Yale University, where she earned her bachelor's degree in East Asian Studies. She worked briefly in publishing in New York City, before getting her MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford.

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." The collection won the California Book Awards' Silver Medal for Fiction and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Awards's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. 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." Publishers Weekly noted: "It is memory — rather than dramatic action — at which Chang excels; her prose is lovely." The novel won a PEN Open Book Award in 2005. Chang's second 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." NPR wrote: "This relatively short novel begins small, but blossoms into a full and resonant story of the pains and perils, falsehoods and truths of trying to be an American artist, in this case poet, against all odds, psychological and social. In its own way, it is rather unforgettable." Chang's fourth book and third novel, The Family Chao, was published by the W. W. Norton & Company. The Guardian praised it: "One of the many pleasures of The Family Chao is the way the novel dramatises the gap between how a family wants to be seen, and its messier inner realities." The Star Tribune called it "A playful literary romp with a serious heart. Operatic and subversive." Barack Obama chose the novel for his 2022 summer reading list. The book was a Jeopardy! clue on October 6, 2022. It won the Anisfield Wolf Book Award for Fiction in 2023. 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. In 2024, she received an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a fourth MacDowell Fellowship.

As the sixth 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. Beyond that, she is credited with increasing the program’s endowment from $2.6 million to $12.5 million. In 2019, she received the Michael J. Brody Award and the Regents' Award for Excellence from the University of Iowa. In a 2022 interview with Open Country Mag, she discussed what her 17 years at the helm means: "One thing that seemed really clear to me was that if we were to represent American literature then we had to bring in literature from all over the world. There is the possibility of creating the conversation not just in this country but around the world that brings in as many voices as possible, and that is a goal of mine with this program. I feel like what we’re doing is work in progress." About her work as the program director, Oprah Daily wrote: "Under Lan Samantha Chang’s mentorship, a new generation of writers has emerged."

Jonathan Freedman. "Transgressions of a Model Minority." Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 2005 Summer; 23 (4): 69–97. Hetty Lanier Keaton. Feeding Hungry Ghosts: Food, Family, and Desire in Stories by Contemporary Chinese American Women. Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, 2002 July; 63 (1): 187–88. U of Tulsa, 2002.