Lan Samantha Chang will read from new work when she appears at Theatre Cedar Rapids-Lindale as part of Out Loud! The Metro Library Network Author Series. The event, which is free, is set for 7 p.m. on Wednesday, May 6.

Chang is the director of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop as well as an alumna of the acclaimed writing program. The author of the novel Inheritance and the fiction collection Hunger: A Novella and Stories, Chang will also take audience questions and sign books.

“We’re very excited about this event,” said Rob Cline, series coordinator for Out Loud! “This is a wonderful opportunity for folks to experience beautiful writing and to hear about the world’s most famous writing program from a woman who knows it from the perspective of both student and instructor.”

The Chicago Tribune described Hunger as being made up of “spare and haunting tales that ask ordinary questions about that extraordinary emotion: love.”

Inheritance, which spans seven decades in China and America and explores the lives of two sisters, was praised by Joanne Wilkinson in Booklist: “Chang fulfills the promise of her haunting short-story collection, Hunger, with an elegant first novel that seems impossibly wise about the strictures of love and culture.”

While a student at The University of Iowa, Chang was the winner of the James-Michener-Copernicus Award. She has also been honored as the California Book Award Silver Medalist, as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award, and with a Bay Area Book Award as well as with literary awards from the Greensboro Review and the Transatlantic Review. Her work has been nominated for the PEN Center USA West Award and the PEN/Hemingway Literature Prize and has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, and The Best American Short Stories.

Out Loud! The Metro Library Network Author Series is supported by the Giacoletto Foundation with media support from The Gazette and event book sales provided by the Cedar Rapids Barnes & Noble. More information about the series is available at www.metrolibrarynetwork.org.