Ling Ma

I am a fiction writer who was born in the Fujian province of China and grew up in Utah and Kansas. My work often engages with issues of the female body, labor, capitalism, and the Chinese-American diaspora. I am interested in the thin boundary between our day-to-day reality and the fantastical, the catastrophic, the extraordinary. My work draws inspiration from horror and sci-fi genres, Kafka, the 90/00s zine scene, contemporary art, and reality TV, to name a few. Before I turned my focus to fiction, I worked in media and publishing, along with other odd jobs: reviewing films, making sandwiches, scooping ice cream, and more.

I am the author of two books of fiction: the novel Severance, and the story collection Bliss Montage, both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. My work has received a MacArthur Fellowship, the Story Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Windham-CampellLiterature Prize, and a Whiting Award. Stories and excerpts have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Prize anthology.

In any creative pursuit, we all have to learn to claim the freedom to take risks and to make exuberant “failures.” The drafts we produce ultimately informs us of what we are trying to do. I hope to help students find ease with the seeming blindness of the creative process, and to channel their anxieties and obsessions within a narrative more fully. I also hope to guide students with practicing scenework, which may come to us less easily than summary. I enjoy advising on full, in-progress drafts and helping to surface what may be hidden.

• "Winner," The Yale Review, 2024
• Bliss Montage, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022
• "Peking Duck," The New Yorker, 2022
• "Tomorrow," Virginia Quarterly Review, 2022
• "Office Hours," The Atlantic, 2022
• Severance, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018