Please join us for a night of fiction with Yiyun Li, author of last year's highly acclaimed short story collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, which won the prestigious International Frank O'Connor Short Story Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and a California Book Award for first fiction.
Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996. She has an MFA from Iowa Writers' Workshop and an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Glimmer Train, Prospect, and elsewhere. She lives in Oakland, California with her husband and their two sons, and teaches in the MFA program at Mills College.
Sample reviews of Yiyun's writing:
"Yiyun has the talent, the vision and the respect for life's insoluble mysteries to be a truly fine writer. There is a strangeness at the heart of her fiction that comes from somewhere other than China - a world inside the author." (The Guardian, UK)
"Li's stories express an inexpressible joy." (The Providence Journal)
"An extraordinary feat of intelligence and style." (SF Chronicle)