May 21, 2025
Gish Jen’s masterly and inimitable voice spans light and dark, open and hidden, history and headlines, the intellect and the passions. As an essayist, she is a writer of ideas. As an inventor of tales, she matches brio and wit with feelingful discernment. In her novels and stories the brilliantly interwoven lives of others become, in Jen’s telling, our own.
– Citation, The American Academy of Arts and Letters
Photo: © Basso Cannarsa
Gish Jen has published short work in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times, and dozens of other periodicals, anthologies and textbooks. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories five times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century.
Jen is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been awarded a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, 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.
Bad Bad Girl is her tenth book.