Lan Samantha Chang, a Harvard University professor and award-winning fiction author who specializes in stories of Chinese-Americans, has been named director of the nation's most prestigious writing program, the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop. Chang succeeds Frank Conroy, the longtime director who announced last summer that he was retiring and died of cancer last week, at age 69. Chang, a Briggs-Copeland lecturer in creative writing at Harvard, will begin at Iowa next January
The 40-year-old Chang is the first Asian-American and the first woman director in the program's
nearly 70-year history. She will take over a program where alumni include Flannery O'Connor
and John Irving and where Pulitzer Prize winners James Alan McPherson and Marilynne
Robinson are among the current instructors. Chang is a native of Appleton, Wis., whose parents
emigrated from China after World War II. She majored in East Asian studies at Yale University
and received a master's degree in public administration from Harvard before studying at Iowa,
where she received an MFA in 1993 and the James Michener-Copernicus Award, a fellowship
for Iowa students of exceptional promise. (Source: Hillel Italifa and Todd Dvorak, Associated
Press, Apr. 12, 2005).