Lan Samantha Chang


Lan Samantha Chang is an American writer of novels and short stories. She is Professor of English at the University of Iowa and Director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Life and career

Samantha Chang was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, the daughter of Chinese parents who survived the World War II Japanese occupation of China and later emigrated to the United States. Chang has received fellowships from Stanford University and Princeton University. She served as the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer of Creative Writing at Harvard University. Chang received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa, an M.P.A. from Harvard University, and a BA in East Asian Studies from Yale University. At Yale, she served as managing editor of the Yale Daily News. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Chang is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Iowa and the Director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop — the first woman, and the first Asian American, to hold that position. She also teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. In 2008 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in the fall of 2015 she accepted a fellowship at the American Library in Paris. In 2019, she was appointed Elizabeth M. Stanley Professor in the Arts.
The five stories in Hunger deal mainly with the position of Chinese in America, though the last of them is set in pre-Communist Shanghai. Inheritance is the story of a wealthy but declining family in Republican China, beginning in 1925 and extending through the period of the Japanese invasion and the post-war flight to Taiwan and then the United States. Chang received the 2005 PEN/Open Book Award for Inheritance.

Critical studies