Gish Jen Biography

Gish Jen (Lillian Jen) was born in Long Island, New York in 1955, a second-generation Chinese-American. She graduated from Harvard with a degree in English and later attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Jen has written several novels, collection of short stories, and a volume of lectures. In addition, her stories have been published in many places including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times, as well as in various anthologies.

Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and an International IMPAC Dublin Book Award, her work was also featured in a PBS American Masters special on the American novel, and is widely taught. Jen was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. She has been awarded a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship, and numerous other awards. In 2003, an American Academy of Arts and Letters jury comprised of John Updike, Cynthia Ozick, Don DeLillo, and Joyce Carol Oates granted her a five-year Mildred and Harold Strauss Living award; Jen also delivered the Massey lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University in 2012. Her most recent book, Tiger Writing: Art, Culture and the Interdependent Self is based on those lectures.

She currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and children.

Gish Jen's website

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