K-Ming Chang

K-Ming Chang (born 1998) is an American novelist and poet. She is the author of the novel Bestiary (2020). Gods of Want won the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. In 2021, Bestiary was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Personal life
K-Ming Chang was born in 1998, the year of the tiger, and grew up in California. In elementary school, she wrote a story about a girl who turns into a tiger; she later recalled it, humorously, as a "really terrible" story. This story contained the seeds of her eventual first novel, Bestiary. Chang currently lives in New York.

Writing
Chang is the Micro editor at The Offing magazine.

Past Lives, Future Bodies (2018)
Chang published Past Lives, Future Bodies in 2018 with Black Lawrence Press. The chapbook takes up themes of matrilineality contrasted with "volatile masculinity", writes Luiza Flynn-Goodlett. In her review, Flynn-Goodlett praised the "magic conjured in this collection—lyric intensity coupled with sharp political intellect", saying "Chang emerges as an urgent, sumptuous voice, a poet of numerous gifts and intellectual dexterity". Several critics remark on Chang’s use of line breaks; in The Rumpus, torrin a. greathouse says they "become a blade, a letter's crease, a hinge opening the next line like a room. Her chapbook is a master class in the potential of enjambment, imbuing each break with the wonder of and trepidation of the unknown."

Bestiary (2020)
Chang published her debut novel Bestiary in 2020. She wrote it in her sophomore year in college while she was at home on summer break, taking summer courses on Asian American history. In an Electric Literature interview, Chang said she "actually wrote Bestiary as a book of essays and was considering it as nonfiction when I was first drafting it." She sold Bestiary, as a novel, to One World, Chris Jackson's imprint at Random House, while still an undergraduate. Another poetry collection was also part of the book deal.

The novel tells the story of three generations of women, Daughter, Mother and Grandmother, who move from Taiwan to Arkansas. After hearing Mother tell the folktale of Hu Gu Po, a tiger spirit who eats children to try to become human, Daughter grows a tiger tail and develops powers she doesn't understand or know how to use. In a review for The New York Times, Amil Niazi contrasts Bestiary with immigrant literature organized around nostalgia and other sentimentality: instead, Bestiary is "full of magic realism that reaches down your throat, grabs hold of your guts and forces a slow reckoning with what it means to be a foreigner, a native, a mother, a daughter — and all the things in between." In a review for the Star Tribune, May-Lee Chai says Chang’s novel “reinvents the genres of immigrant novel, queer coming-of-age story, and mother-and-daughter tale.”

Bone House (2021)
In 2021, Chang's micro-chapbook Bone House was released by Bull City Press as part of their Inch series. The collection functions as a queer Taiwanese-American retelling of Wuthering Heights, in which an unnamed narrator moves into a butcher's mansion "with a life of its own."

Gods of Want (2022)
Chang published her short story collection, entitled Gods of Want, with One World in 2022. In an Electric Literature interview, Chang said her desire to release a collection came from her "thinking about story collections as a neighborhood and a community, and the short story form presenting that possibility of containing many collective voices." It went on to win the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and it was also put on the New York Times 100 Notable Books list for 2022. Alexandra Kleeman, writing for The New York Times, remarked of Chang's stories: "Each one is possessed of a powerful hunger, a drive to metabolize the recognizable features of a familiar world and transform them into something wilder, and achingly alive."

Organ Meats (2023)
In 2023, Chang published the novel Organ Meats with One World. The novel follows two best friends who, upon encountering the stray dogs in their neighborhood, feel a strong yet consequential desire to become dogs.

In an Electric Literature interview, Chang explained that her novels Bestiary, Gods of Want, and Organ Meats compose a "mythic triptych": "I think of the three books almost like doors in a hallway. I realized they were a trio not just aesthetically or thematically, but in the way that they were oriented. The narrators are people who have the future at their back and are looking into the past in a very speculative way."

Cecelia (2024)
Chang published the novella Cecelia in 2024 with Coffee House Press. A few weeks before its May 21 release, it was excerpted in Electric Literature and recommended by Brynne Rebele-Henry, who lauded her recent work as "balancing desire with the abject, conveying the intensity of first love without the cliché." The book follows two girls who, as adults, reencounter one another for the first time since childhood in a chiropractor's office.

Other work
Chang’s poetry was included in the 2019 Pushcart Anthology.

Chang's short story "Haiyang" was published in Issue 41 of the Berkeley Fiction Review.

Honors
In 2018, Chang was named a Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry by The Adroit Journal. She has also been a Kundiman Fellow. In 2019, Chang was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in the lesbian poetry category for her collection Past Lives, Future Bodies. In 2020, she was awarded the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" prize (selected by previous honoree Justin Torres). In 2021, her novel Bestiary was long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.