Ling Ma Reading

The Edelstein-Keller Visiting Writer Series presents the fiction writer and MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Ling Ma reading from her work.

Presented by the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English, this in-person event is free and open to the public. ASL provided. For further questions about accessibility services and the venue, please email [email protected] or call 612-626-1528. 

Ling Ma's most recent book is Bliss Montage: Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), which was named a National Indie Bestseller, a New Yorker Best Book of the Year, and a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel Severance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018), described as a “meticulous, caustic description of life in big cities and what happens when a terrible pandemic slowly annihilates most of the human population.” Severance won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Named a New York Times Notable Book and an NPR Best Book of 2018, it has been translated into seven languages. 

Stories and excerpts have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Granta, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Prize anthology. Her fellowships and awards include the MacArthur Fellowship, the Story Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Windham-Campell Literature Prize, and a Whiting Award. 

Ling was born in the Fujian province of China and grew up in Utah and Kansas. She received her MFA from Cornell University. Prior to graduate school she worked as a journalist and editor. She has taught creative writing and English at Cornell University and the University of Chicago. She lives in Chicago.