Kat Tang

Kat Tang is a former lawyer turned fiction writer with an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Born in Hangzhou, China; relocated to Sendai, Japan; and then raised in various locales in California's Bay Area, she is interested in transnational identity, cultural expression, and how individuals make and fake connections in an ever-shifting world. Her debut novel, Five-Star Stranger, received starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist, and was featured on NPR and Oprah and in People magazine. Five-Star Stranger is about a rentable man who takes on various guises for his clients in order to run away from his own past. It asks: can someone who is unhappy make others happy? And what is the human cost of the pursuit of happiness? Her comics and short stories have also appeared in The New Yorker, Electric Literature, and The Margins, among others. Kat currently lives in New York City. June and Yumi's Disaster Utopia is her second novel.