May-lee Chai
Visiting Writer, 2004-06

May-lee Chai, a visiting writer at Amherst College, is the author of two books. In her first novel, My Lucky Face, a story critics called, "beautifully told," May-lee Chai investigates the impact of China's Cultural Revolution by following the life of one woman there. Nominated for a National Book Award in 2001, her second book, The Girl from Purple Mountain, is a family memoir that Chai co-wrote with her father to examine the impact of World War II on Chinese civilians. Marilyn Krysl called it "a work which smolders and sings." Chai's fiction and essays have been widely published in such places as the San Francisco Chronicle, ZYZZYVA, and Missouri Review. She has taught fiction writing, political science, and literature.