When Li moved to the United States from Beijing in 1996, she intended to pursue a Ph.D. in immunology at the University of Iowa. But soon, the city of literature’s influence changed those plans.
“When I arrived in Iowa City, someone told me everybody in town is writing a novel. And I'm sure if you know Iowa City, possibly everyone in town is writing a novel. I just thought I would try writing, too,” Li said.
She began taking an evening writing course to improve her English literacy skills with a teacher who had graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
“She asked me after I turned in the first piece if I ever thought about publishing. I was quite shocked because it was the only time I had written anything — in English or in Chinese,” Li said.
Soon after she began writing, Li left the immunology program to join the Nonfiction Writing Program and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Although English is not her first language, all of her published works were written in English.
“I certainly did not intend to be a writer in Chinese and, when I was in China, never thought about writing. Somehow, I fell in love with the English language, and I fell in love with this feeling of writing in this new language,” Li said.
As Li learned to write, she developed a unique relationship with the English language.
“I always say, if you're writing in a second language, you don't have that intimacy with the language as a native speaker does, but on the other hand, it's a clean slate. You could just start building a relationship with the language as an adult, which was what I did,” she explained.
Li earned MFAs from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Nonfiction Writing Program in 2005 and went on to lead an extraordinary career as a writer. She was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and a Windham Campbell Prize, among other accolades, for her acclaimed fiction and nonfiction writing. Li currently directs the creative writing program at Princeton University.
Earlier this year, Li won a Pulitzer Prize for her 2025 memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow. The book grapples with the devastating loss of her son, James, to suicide. Her 2019 novel, Where Reason Ends, was written for her eldest son Vincent, who also died by suicide.
“Any language falls short in front of a catastrophe,” Li said. “Words fall short, but the shadows — the long shadows of words — may be able to reach the unspeakable.”
The books preserve each son’s distinct character, and writing them allowed Li to confront her role as a parent.
“As parents, we can only offer them a framework for living. We cannot do the living for them. We cannot make decisions for them. In making that framework, we have done all we can for them ... but that framework is not invincible. There's a bigger world out there doing all these things to young people,” she said.
Li said her decision to share these stories is the same reason she writes: to tackle something, knowing her words are limited.
“The losses are monumental, and the absence is monumental in our lives, but there's something about the essence of human beings — the essence of Vincent, the essence of James. And that essence got preserved in the books. Someone could come to me and say, ‘I felt I met him,’ and that, to me, is important,” Li said.
To hear this conversation, listen to Talk of Iowa, hosted by Charity Nebbe. Caitlin Troutman produced this episode.
