Another First for Iowa Writer’s Workshop

Frank Conroy would have been pleased. The former University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop director taught Lan Samantha Chang to take the teaching of writing very seriously, and she has. Chang now succeeds Conroy — who died earlier this month from cancer at age 69 — as director of the famed workshop.

Chang, a Harvard University professor and award-winning fiction author, is the first female and the first Asian-American to head up the program, whose alumni include Flannery O’Connor and John Irving and whose current instructors include Pulitzer prize-winners Marilynne Robinson and James Alan McPherson.

Congratulations to Ms. Chang!