“Gish Jen is at the forefront of American writers dealing with that most basic of American issues―who we are as a country and a culture. Her work is as serious and important as this issue, but her books and stories are nevertheless a joy to read, full of wit, humor, nuance, and emotion.”

―Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer

Brilliant, hilarious, and ever-surprising, Gish Jen tackles the issues of our time with originality and heart. Through both fiction and nonfiction, her work explores themes of identity in America as she challenges us to examine how the cultures we are steeped in influence the stories we tell. Her most recent book, the genre-bending autobiographical novel Bad Bad Girl, follows a mother and a daughter who are forced to reckon with one another across decades. Praised as “funny, sad and poignant” by People and “a transcendent work of art” by The Boston Globe, it was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and named the #1 Best Reviewed Book of 2025 by LitHub. A warm and witty speaker, her lively and informative talks explore the experiences, passions, and practices that give rise to her work.

“What an amazing novel, wild like love and twice as revealing. Gish Jen has written the multigenerational mother-daughter epic of our new century. Bad Bad Girl spans decades, oceans, continents, generations, languages, showing us we can escape almost anything—except the voices of our parents. Intergenerational mother-daughter mayhem of the absolute best smartest vexing most moving kind.”

—Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Jen’s most recent collection of short fiction, Thank You, Mr. Nixon, was named one of the best books of 2022 by The New Yorker, Oprah Daily, and NPR. Refracting the fifty years since the opening of China through the eyes of everyday Americans, it was praised as “a jewel box of creativity” by The Minneapolis Star Tribune and “an authorial tour de force” by The Boston Globe.

“Marvelous… On the surface her storytelling seems simple and direct, but the closer you look the more layered and complex it becomes.… In all her work, Jen locates the tensions between inherited and lived cultures.”

—The New York Times

Called “a stone-cold masterpiece” by Ann Patchett, Jen’s sci-fi thriller The Resisters imagines an America some fifty years from now, in which surveillance technology supports a new Jim Crow—challenged by a girl with a golden arm and an underground baseball league. It was named one of the best sci-fi novels of all time by Esquire and one of the best dystopian novels of all time by Parade. As Newsday simply declared, “The Resisters is a 1984 for our times.”

Jen’s early novels, including Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land and The Love Wife, are classics of American immigrant literature, distinguished by an inimitable blend of charm and vision. Jen explores our changing world in her nonfiction as well. In The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap, Jen offers a provocative and essential look at the different ideas Eastern and Western cultures have about self and society.

In 2012, she was asked to give the Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University. Her lectures―published by Harvard University Press as Tiger Writing: Art, Culture and the Interdependent Self―have since become a mainstay of creative writing courses. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and dozens of other periodicals and anthologies. She has been published in The Best American Short Stories four times, including in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. In fact, for a 1999 issue of The Times Magazine (UK) where preeminent 20th century figures tapped their successors for the new millennium, Updike chose Jen.

“I am proud proud proud to share ancestors—and the novel and the world—with Gish Jen.”

―Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior 

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Jen is a recipient of fellowships from, among others the Radcliffe Institute, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction and a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She serves on the Board of Directors of the MacArthur Foundation and holds honorary doctorates from Emerson College and Williams College. Her work has been featured in a PBS American Masters special on the American novel.

For more information on Gish Jen, please visit her on Instagram or at gishjen.com.