Presenters' Biographies

Lan Samantha Chang, MPA, MFA

Lan Samantha Chang has served as director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop since 2006. She is the author of a collection of short fiction, Hunger (1998), and a novel, Inheritance (2004). Her work has been translated into nine languages and has been chosen twice for The Best American Short Stories. She has received creative writing fellowships from Stanford University, Princeton University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is also the recipient of a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Sayantani DasGupta, MD/MPH

Sayantani DasGupta is assistant professor of clinical pediatrics and core faculty in the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. She teaches in the graduate programs in narrative medicine at Columbia and health advocacy at Sarah Lawrence College, and in the summer writing seminar "Writing the Medical Experience." She is on the editorial boards for Literature and Medicine and the weekly online magazine Pulse - Voices from the Heart of Medicine.

Her academic work in medical humanities and narrative medicine has appeared in scholarly collections and been published in journals such as The Lancet, Pediatrics, Academic Medicine, Teaching and Learning in Medicine, Literature and Medicine and Journal of Medical Humanities. Her creative work has been published in collections from Creative Nonfiction and Kaplan and journals including JAMA, Hastings Center Report, and Literary Mama. She is the co-author of The Demon Slayers and Other Stories: Bengali Folktales, the author of Her Own Medicine: A Woman's Journey from Student to Doctor, and the co-editor of the award winning collection of women's illness narratives, Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write their Bodies. She is currently working on a collection of essays on motherhood and medicine, as well as a middle-grade children's novel.

Nick Flynn, MFA

Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004), won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, and has been translated into thirteen languages. He is also the author of two books of poetry, Some Ether (Graywolf, 2000), which won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and Blind Huber (Graywolf, 2002). His newest book, a memoir entitled The Ticking is the Bomb: A Memoir of Bewilderment was released by Norton in 2009. He has been awarded fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation, The Library of Congress, The Amy Lowell Trust, and The Fine Arts Work Center. Some of the venues his poems, essays and non-fiction have appeared in include The New Yorker, the Paris Review, National Public Radio’s “This American Life,” and The New York Times Book Review. He worked as a “field poet” and as an artistic collaborator on the film “Darwin’s Nightmare,” which was nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary in 2006. One semester a year, he teaches at the University of Houston and spends the rest of the year elsewhere.