Chang To Head Writers' Workshop

After a grueling and public selection process, Lan Samantha Chang, Briggs-Copeland lecturer on English and American Literature and Language, has been selected to direct the University of Iowa (UI) Writers’ Workshop, beginning in January 2006. A graduate of the program, Chang is the first female as well as the first Asian-American director of the Workshop.

Under the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Workshop was the first creative writing degree program in the U.S. and will have been in existence for 70 years in 2006.

Each year, 25 poets and 25 fiction writers are admitted to the two-year masters program. They attend workshops and seminars and everything is graded on a pass-fail basis, said acting co-director Marilynne Robinison, who won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction last week.

The Workshop began a selection process in January for a new director after Chang’s predecessor, Frank Conroy, announced he was stepping down due to an illness. He has recently passed away.

Conroy, who was the fourth director of the program since its inception, taught Chang, along with Robinson and James A. McPherson, also a co-director of the Workshop.

Chang was the only female among the four finalists, chosen from a list of about 30 or 40 applicants, McPherson said.

“She...perhaps will broaden the program just by virtue of the fact that she’s a woman, although her other credentials were more than sufficient to our choice,” Robinson said.

In addition to continuing the Workshop’s tradition of gathering the best young writers in the U.S., Chang said she would also like to be an advocate for the Workshop’s brilliant faculty and increase scholarship money for students.

Chang’s latest novel, “Inheritance,” was published last summer and her writing has also graced the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, and “The Best American Short Stories.”

She has taught at Harvard and Stanford, experiences that McPherson cited as valuable to her selection as director. He also mentioned “personality, and in some respects, her youth,” as Chang’s other outstanding features, adding that she gets along well with others.

Chang said she is aware of her pioneering status as the first female and first Asian-American director of the program, but the position also means returning to her midwestern roots.

“I’ve become aware of myself as a midwesterner in the process of applying for the job and the Workshop and [the UI] community are very open and accepting like many artistic communities, so one of my basic feelings is coming home as a midwesterner.”

Although she will leave Harvard after next fall, Chang said she is looking forward to her new home.

“I feel that the University of Iowa is a very sheltering place for the arts and I look forward to working for an institution that takes the practice of the arts seriously,” she said.

Chang also cites her love for Iowa, the state that financed her first efforts in writing.

“The sweet corn is pretty good,” she said.

—Staff writer Lulu Zhou can be reached at luluzhou@fas.harvard.edu.