Bio – Amy Tan
Amy attended five colleges: Linfield College, San Jose City College, San Jose State University, University of California at Santa Cruz, and University of California at Berkeley. she received her b.a. from her with a double major in English and Linguistics, followed by her M.A. in linguistics. She worked as a language development specialist for programs throughout the county serving children with developmental disabilities, ages birth to five, and later became the director of a us funded demonstration project. uu. education department to integrate multicultural children with developmental disabilities into early childhood programs. In 1983, she became a freelance business writer, working with telecommunications companies including IBM and AT&T.
In 1985, Amy began writing fiction as an incentive to reduce her heavy freelance workload. she attended her first workshop at the squaw valley writing community and then joined a writing group led by writer and creative writing teacher molly giles. Her first story was published in 1986 in a small literary magazine, FM Cinco, which was later reprinted in Seventeen and Grace. Literary Agents Sandy Dijkstra read her early work and offered to serve as her agent, although Amy stated that she had no plans to pursue a career as a fiction writer. In 1987, Amy went to China for the first time, accompanied by her mother. When she returned home, she learned that she had received three offers for a storybook, only three of which had been written. The resulting book, The Luck and Joy Club, was acclaimed as a novel and became a surprise bestseller, spending more than forty weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List.
His other novels are The Wife of the Kitchen God, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonemaker’s Daughter, Saving Fish from Drowning, and The Valley of Wonder (2013), all New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of a memoir, The Opposite of Fate, two children’s books, The Moon Lady and Sagwa, The Chinese Siamese Cat, and numerous articles for magazines including The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, and National Geographic. she is also the author of the short story “rules for virgins” published in e-book format (original author). Her work has been translated into 35 languages, from Spanish, French, and Finnish to Chinese, Arabic, and Hebrew. Amy Tan’s latest book, Where She Begins the Past: A Writer’s Memoir, will be published by ECCO/HarperCollins in October 2017. She is working on another novel, The Memory of Desire.
amy co-produced and co-wrote with ron bass on the film adaptation of “the joy luck club,” for which they received wga and bafta nominations. She was a creative consultant for “Sagwa”, the Emmy Award-nominated children’s TV series on PBS, which aired worldwide, including in the UK, Latin America, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan and Singapore. her new yorker story, “immortal heart”, was performed on stages all over the united states. And in France her essays and stories are found in hundreds of anthologies and textbooks, and are assigned as required reading at many high schools and universities. She was the guest editor of America’s Best Short Stories in 1999. She appeared as herself on the animated series The Simpsons. She served as narrator with the San Francisco Symphony performing an original score for Sagwa, by composer Nathan Wang. Amy Tan has been nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the International Orange Award, and has won many awards, including the Commonwealth Gold Award. , and georgetown in both washington, dc and doha, qatar. She has given a Ted Talk and spoken at the White House, she has appeared on the popular NPR show Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me, as well as on Sesame Street on public television. The National Endowment for the Arts chose the Joy Luck Club for its 2007 Great Reading Program. Amy also wrote the libretto The Bonemaker’s Daughter, which had its world premiere with the San Francisco Opera in September 2008. The Fate of the book! luck! chance! Amy Tan, Stewart Wallace, and the Making of the Bonemaker’s Daughter, by Ken Smith, was published in Chronicle Books in August 2008, and a documentary about the opera, The Journey of the Bonemaker’s Daughter, premiered on PBS in 2011. Amy Tan has served as lead rhythmic “dominatrix,” backup singer, and second tambourine with the literary garage band, Rock Bottom Remnants, whose members included Stephen King, Dave Barry, and Scott Turow. her annual concerts raised over a million dollars for literacy programs. To honor her support of zoological field research, a newly discovered species of terrestrial leech, Chtonobdela tanae, was named after her, the first soft-bodied microscopic organism identified by a new method of computed tomography. In keeping with her love of science in nature and her childhood love of doodling, she recently turned to drawing nature journals.
amy lives with her husband and two dogs in california and new york.
