Wang Ping was born in Shanghai and grew up on a small island in the East China Sea. After three years of farming in a mountain village, she attended Beijing University. In 1985 she left China to study in the U.S., earning her Ph.D. from New York University. She is the acclaimed author of the short story collection American Visa (1994), the novel Foreign Devil (1996), two poetry collections, Of Flesh & Spirit (1998) and The Magic Whip (2003), the cultural study Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China (2000), and most recently Emperor Dragon (2006), a traditional Chinese folk tale, and The Last Communist Virgin (April 2007), a second collection of stories. Wang Ping is also the editor and co-translator of the anthology New Generation: Poetry from China Today (1999), and her writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the New York State Council for the Arts for poetry, and the Minnesota State Arts Board for fiction. She is associate professor of English at Macalester College. (source: Words Without Borders)