The Melanie Brown Lecturer Series
The Melanie Brown Lecturer Series is one of the exciting opportunities for aspiring writers to meet established authors, specifically writers of fiction, through Chatham’s MFA in Creative Writing program. The Melanie Brown Lecturer is presented each year through the generosity of The Melanie and Fred R. Brown Endowed Fund.
Melanie Brown was inspired by the MFA program’s emphasis on nurturing creative writers in part through place-based writing. The selection of each year’s Melanie Brown Lecturer is guided by the desire to highlight fiction writers with a strong sense of place in her or his writing. Students will have opportunities to interact with the Melanie Brown Lecturer both in and out of the classroom.
2012 Melanie Brown Lecturer
Lan Samantha Chang
Lan Samantha Chang is the author of two novels, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost and Inheritance, and a story collection, Hunger. Hunger was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Award and the winner of the Southern Review Fiction Prize. Inheritance won the PEN/Beyond Margins Prize for the Novel. Samantha is the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award, an NEA Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has taught fiction writing at Stanford University, Harvard University, and the MFA Program for Writing at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where she is professor of creative writing at the University of Iowa and Director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
