About the author
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Fiction and Nonfiction Writer
Joan Burbick
Born in Chicago, Joan Burbick has lived throughout the United States and in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Warsaw. She has taught and lectured at Washington State University, the University of Colorado, Boulder, Stanford University, Wesleyan University, and the Harvard School of Medicine.
In China, she taught at Beijing Forestry University, Jilin University, and the David C. Lam Institute for East West Studies in Hong Kong. In Europe, she taught or lectured at the University of Warsaw, Poland, the Max Planck-Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, and the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University of Frankfurt, Germany among others.
She has given radio interviews throughout the United States and in Europe. In 2007, she was featured in the PBS documentary, After Newtown.
First publishing books on cultural criticism with the University of Pennsylvania and Cambridge University, she then focused on writing for a general audience. Her nonfiction books were based on interviews with Americans about gun culture and rodeo queens.
Their stories about violence, memory, and betrayal led her to write the novel, STRIPLAND.
Her forthcoming novel, ERASED, is based on the disappearance of a Chinese woman scientist, Lin Qui Fang, her mother-in-law.
Puzzled about her husband's Chinese family that had erased the life and death of his mother, she decided to understand why. She began her research with personal letters from his Chinese family and then continued by searching archives in Philadelphia, New Haven, and Boston. She stayed in places her mother-in-law would have lived or visited in the 1940s and immersed herself in the pathways of fleeing Chinese during the Japanese occupation. She read histories of modern China and Shanghai wartime newspapers. Erased was based on these years of investigation,
At present, she lives in Spokane, Washington.
"I used to assume history and memory would always triumph over temporary aberrations and return to their rightful place. It now appeaers the opposite is true."
Yan Lianke
