Kecia Lynn speaks with author Yiyun Li, author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Vagrants, on this episode of “Conversations” recorded at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop’s Dey House, on the University of Iowa campus.

Yiyun Li, an alumna of both the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the UI Nonfiction Writing Program, reads from “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl” her new short-story collection, October 4, 2010.

This recording takes place at Prairie Lights Bookstore in downtown Iowa City.

Writers’ Workshop graduate Yiyun Li reads from her new novel, Kinder Than Solitude. Kinder Than Solitude is the story of three people whose lives are changed by a murder one of them may have committed. Moving back and forth in time, between America today and China in the 1990s, the book illustrates how even the most innocent person is capable of a heartless crime. Yiyun Li is the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the Frank O’Connor Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. Li is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Oakland, California. “(Li’s) characters are portrayed with a harsh beauty, and one’s emotions become deeply engaged with their fates. This is an exceptional novel and Yiyun Li has grown into one of our major novelists.’ — Salman Rushdie

David Wystan Owen, a writer and former student of Li’s, moderates this special event.

In 2008 I, [Jan Weissmiller] along with my friend and fellow poet Jane Mead, became the co-owner of Prairie Lights, whose story continues to evolve, its ghosts hovering over the laptops that occupy the Times Club from 9 AM until 9 PM. Yiyun Li, who wrote there almost every day while she was in the Workshop, says it’s where she composed her first collection of stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Random House, 2005).

She planned to become a scientist, and in 1996 came to the United States to study immunology at the University of Iowa. “I passed my qualifications for my Ph.D., and I started to panic,” she recalls. “I was a capable scientist, but not passionate. Not dedicated. Pretty soon, I quit the Ph.D. program. I got my master’s and worked in a hospital doing research.”

Meanwhile, her college sweetheart from Beijing University had joined her in Iowa City and they soon married. She signed up for an eight-week evening writing course. When she submitted her first story, the teacher asked her to stay behind after class and asked if she’d thought of publishing.