The How The Why: Anelise Chen And Q.M. Zhang

The How The Why is a podcast documenting the creative process and the creative purpose hosted by Jon-Barrett Ingels. This free weekly series is an educational resource provided to discuss the evolution of literary arts with industry innovators.

Anelise Chen is the author of So Many Olympic Exertions (Kaya Press 2017), an experimental novel that blends elements of sportswriting, memoir, and self help. She hails from Temple City, California, and received a BA in English from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Fiction from NYU. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, NPR, BOMB Magazine, The New Republic, VICE, Village Voice and many other publications. She has received fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and she will be a 2019 Literature Fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. She currently teaches writing at Columbia University and writes a column on mollusks for The Paris Review.

Q.M. Zhang (Kimberly Chang), author of Accomplice to Memory (Kaya Press 2017), grew up in upstate New York, lived in China and Hong Kong, and currently makes her home in Western Massachusetts. She is a writer and teacher of creative non/fiction stories and forms, with a focus on Chinese American border crossings. Trained in the disciplines of anthropology and psychology, she has published ethnographic studies of Asian diasporic communities on both sides of the Pacific. Faced with the limitations of her social science tools, she has worked over the last decade to develop herself at the craft of creative non/fiction as the quintessential hybrid literary form for writing about migration and diaspora. She is an alumni of the Juniper Summer Writing Institute and was a resident writer at the Vermont Studio Center. Her book, Accomplice to Memory, combines memoir, fiction, and documentary photographs to explore the limits and possibilities of truth telling across generations and geographies. An excerpt from the book was published in The Massachusetts Review. She currently teaches at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA.