Lan Samantha Chang to Head Iowa Writers' Workshop

Posted on April 15, 2005

A woman will be the new director of the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop for the first time. She is the fifth director of the program which was founded about 70 years ago. Lan Samantha Chang, 40, is a professor at Harvard University. She is also an award-winning fiction author whose stories focus on the lives of Chinese-Americans.

Lan Samantha Chang is a first-generation Chinese American. She tells USA Today, "Our literary world is larger than it used to be. The fact that I'm the new director is an illustration of that."

She will leave Harvard and move to Iowa to take the post. Everyone keeps asking her what she's going to change about the 70 year-old program, which boasts alumni such as Flannery O'Connor and John Irving. But Professor Chang is playing her cards close to her vest: we'll just have to wait and see.

Chang told USA Today the she was inspired to embark on a career writing by a class at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education called Beginning Fiction Writing workshop. Her books include Hunger: A Novella and Stories and Inheritance.