Skip to main content

Karissa Chen

Biography

Karissa Chen

Karissa Chen is a Fulbright fellow, Kundiman Fiction fellow, and a VONA/Voices fellow whose fiction and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Eater, The Cut, NBC News THINK!, Longreads, PEN America, Catapult, Gulf Coast and Guernica, among others. She was awarded an artist fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, as well as multiple writing residencies including at Millay Arts, where she was a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others. She was formerly a senior fiction editor at The Rumpus and currently serves as the editor-in-chief at Hyphen magazine. She received an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and splits her time between New Jersey and Taipei, Taiwan.

Karissa Chen

Books by Karissa Chen

Homeseeking
by Karissa Chen - Fiction, Romance

Haiwen is buying bananas at a 99 Ranch Market in Los Angeles when he looks up and sees Suchi, his Suchi, for the first time in 60 years. To recently widowed Haiwen it feels like a second chance, but Suchi has only survived by refusing to look back. Suchi was seven when she first met Haiwen in their Shanghai neighborhood, drawn by the sound of his violin. Their childhood friendship blossomed into soul-deep love, but when Haiwen secretly enlisted in the Nationalist army in 1947 to save his brother from the draft, she was left with just his violin and a note: Forgive me. HOMESEEKING follows the separated lovers through six decades of tumultuous Chinese history, telling Haiwen’s story from the present to the past while tracing Suchi’s from her childhood to the present, meeting in the crucible of their lives.