Lan Samantha Chang grew up in Appleton, Wisconsin, the daughter of parents who emigrated to the United States from mainland China. She received her bachelor of arts in East Asian Studies from Yale University and her master in fine arts from the Iowa Writing Workshop, which is considered one of the top creative writing programs in the US. Chang’s literary short stories have been included in the annual Best American Short Stories collections and she has been awarded creative writing fellowships from Princeton University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the MacDowell Colony, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University. Chang’s first book, Hunger, a collection of short stories and a novella, was published in 1998 and was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her two previous novels are Inheritance (2004) and All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost (2010).

In 2005, Chang returned to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop as a director and member of the faculty—the first woman and the first Asian American to hold that role. During her tenure, the workshop has maintained its reputation for high quality while diversifying its range and the student writers it accepts. In interviews, Chang has discussed her wish to depart from common stereotypes about Chinese Americans in her work and instead study the complexity of such themes as racial prejudice, home, and the immigrant experience, and explode myths about Asian culture commonly held in the West.