Amy Tan

Amy Tan is an American author best known for her novels about Chinese-American identity, family memory, intergenerational relationships, and the psychological terrain of mothers and daughters. She rose to wide international attention with her debut novel, The Joy Luck Club, published in 1989, which spent more than forty weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, became a critically acclaimed feature film in 1993, and has been translated into dozens of languages. Her subsequent novels, including The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, Saving Fish from Drowning, and The Valley of Amazement, extended her exploration of the themes that made her debut so resonant: the inheritance of trauma across generations, the difficulty and necessity of telling one's own story, and the ways in which silence can travel down a family line.

Tan was born in Oakland, California, in 1952 to immigrant parents from China and lost both her father and her brother to brain tumors when she was a teenager. Her relationship with her mother, who had survived enormous hardship before emigrating, became one of the central subjects of her fiction. In addition to her novels she has written memoirs, including The Opposite of Fate and Where the Past Begins, as well as children's books and essays. She has also been involved in various creative projects outside literature, including the all-author rock-and-roll band Rock Bottom Remainders. The Backyard Bird Chronicles represents a new direction in her work, drawing on her long-standing interest in drawing and her growing devotion to natural history. She lives in California, where the birds that populate her garden, and the journals she keeps about them, continue to be a daily part of her creative life.