Shawna Yang Ryan

Shawna Yang Ryan, a former Fulbright scholar, is the author of the new novel “Green Island,” her second, set in Taiwan. Ryan is a California-born Taiwanese-American. To write the novel, she performed extensive research while traveling in Taiwan and reviewing older archive material in print and online, stating in an interview with The New York Times: “I often thought of my research as similar to unraveling a sweater — I’d tug at one thread, and a whole sleeve would come undone — one interviewee would introduce me to another, who’d introduce me to another, and so on.” Ryan teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her short fiction has appeared in ZYZZYVA, The Asian American Literary Review, Kartika Review, and Berkeley Fiction Review.