Yiyun Li's debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, Pen/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award, and the California Book Award for fiction. Her subsequent works have also won numerous awards including the gold medal of California Book Award for fiction for The Vagrants; finalist of the Story Prize for Gold Boy, Emerald Girl; and her most recent book Kinder Than Solitude was published to critical acclaim. Other awards include, Whiting Award, Lannan Foundation Residency fellow, 2010 MacArthur Foundation fellow, and 2014 Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has also been selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35 and by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. Yiyun Li is also a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space. The New York Times says, "There's something about the poise, the tidiness, the seemingly effortless calm of Yiyun Li's writing that makes it easy to see her as an author who, like Jhumpa Lahiri, employs a Chekhovian neutrality to give the complicated, messy, ostensibly 'colorful' lives of her characters a kind of unthreatening watercolor ambience."

[source: Rochester Arts & Lectures series website, 2015-May-13]