In 2009, Fudan University launched China’s first MFA program in creative writing, spurring a wave of such programs in Chinese universities. Many of these programs’ founding members point to the Iowa Writers Workshop and, specifically, its International Writers Program, which invited dozens of Mainland Chinese writers to take part between 1979 and 2019, as their inspiration.

In her book, The Transpacific Flow: Creative Writing Programs in China (Association for Asian Studies, 2024), Jin Feng explores why Chinese authors took part in the U.S. programs, and how they tried to implement its teaching methods in mainland China–clearly, a very different political and cultural environment.

In this interview, Jin and I talk about the Iowa Writers Workshop, the Chinese authors that attended, and the surprising links between U.S. and Chinese academia.

Jin Feng is Professor of Chinese and Japanese and the Orville and Mary Patterson Routt Professor of Literature at Grinnell College, USA. She has published four English monographs: The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction (Purdue University Press: 2004), The Making of a Family Saga (SUNY Press: 2009), Romancing the Internet: Producing and Consuming Chinese Web Romance (Brill, 2013), and Tasting Paradise on Earth: Jiangnan Foodways (University of Washington Press, 2019), three Chinese books such as A Book for Foodies and numerous articles in both English and Chinese.

You can read an excerpt of The Transpacific Flow here.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Transpacific Flow. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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