Gish Jen

Gish Jen has published short work in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and dozens of other periodicals, anthologies and textbooks. Her work has been chosen for The Best American Short Stories five times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. Nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award, her work was featured in a PBS American Masters’ special on the American novel and is widely taught.

Her novels include Typical American (1991), a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and its sequel Mona in the Promised Land (1996), named one of the ten best books of 1996 by the Los Angeles Times; World and Town (2011), which was nominated for the 2012 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; The Resisters (2020); and the story collections Who’s Irish? (1999) and Thank You, Mr. Nixon (2022). All of her books have been New York Times notable books.

Jen is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship, and a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living; she has also delivered the William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University. She is currently a Visiting Professor at Harvard.