Jenny Zhang

Bio

Jenny Zhang is a writer and poet. Her debut short story collection Sour Heart, published by Lenny/Random House in 2017, has received both the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the L.A. Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. In addition to her fiction and poetry, Zhang’s essays have been published by The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Rookie, and BuzzFeed. Here, she discusses her approach to writing as an attempt to answer unanswerable questions, letting go of the idea of greatness, and the importance of building your own trusted community.