2025 ANNUAL MCKINNEY CONTEST GUEST SPEAKER

Lan Samantha Chang

7 p.m. Wednesday, April 9, 2025

Reading and McKinney Writing Contest Awards,
The Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS), 
Rensselaer (RPI), 110 8th St, Troy NY 12180

Lan Samantha Chang is a prize-winning fiction writer and director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her most recent novel is The Family Chao (2022), about a noisy, bickering Chinese-American family, the owners of a restaurant in a fictional Wisconsin town.

When patriarch Leo Chao is found dead― presumably murdered― the family attracts a great deal of unwanted attention. Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the novel was named a “Best Book of the Year” by Vogue and NPR.

The Guardian said, "One of the many pleasures of The Family Chao is the way the novel dramatises the gap between how a family wants to be seen, and its messier inner realities.”

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Sponsored by Rensselaer’s Annual McKinney Writing Contest and Reading in partnership with the NYS Writers Institute.

For more information, contact McKinney@rpi.edu