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 (the
Stegner Fellowship) and
Princeton University. She has most recently 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
B.A.
in East Asian Studies from
Yale University. At Yale, she served as managing editor of the
Yale Daily News, and at Harvard, she received a fellowship from the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Chang is currently Professor of English at the University of Iowa and Director of the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop; she is the first female and
Asian American writer to serve as director of the Workshop. She also teaches in the
Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. In 2008 she received a
Guggenheim Fellowship.
The five stories in
Hunger
(1998) deal mainly with the position of
Chinese in America
, though the last of them is set in pre-Communist
Shanghai.
Inheritance
(2004) 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.
![[F]](/images/site.gif){kind=small}
