All Events
Yiyun Li (Friday seminar's guest speaker)
MFA Writers' Series
Friday, November 21
Writers' Studio, San Francisco Campus
195 DeHaro (at 15th Street)
Contact: Teresa Walsh, program manager, 415.703.9237 or email
For additional information, including a comprehensive list of speakers, see the MFA in Writing Program's Writers' Series.
Yiyun Li was born and raised in Beijing. In 1996 she came to the United States where she earned 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 has received grants and awards from Lannan Foundation and Whiting Foundation.
Her debut collection of work, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award for first fiction. Granta recently deemed Li as one of the Best Young American Novelists.
Li's short story of the same name was recently been made into a feature film directed by Wayne Wang and starring Henry O and Faye Yu.
She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and two sons, and teaches in the MFA program at Mills College.