Jennifer Cody Epstein is the author of The Painter from Shanghai, an imaginative retelling of the life of Chinese prostitute-turned-post-Impressionist Pan Yuliang. Her fiction has also appeared in several literary magazines She has lived and worked in the U.S., Japan, China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Italy for publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Asian Wall Street Journal, Mademoiselle, Self and Parents, as well as for the NBC and HBO networks. She has a Masters in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University and an MFA in fiction from Columbia University, where she is an adjunct professor in the School of the Arts. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, filmmaker Michael Epstein, and their two daughters. Website: <a href="http://www.jennifercodyepstein.com/Home.html"
by Jennifer Cody Epstein Online social networking is in the news of late–particularly as it applies to active, “older” users. Technically, that is me, though I’m inclined to dispute “older” as a demographic label (I’m 39! At least, according to Facebook’s Realage application). But I can’t argue that I’m active. Over the past year, in…
by Jennifer Cody Epstein Last April I received a somewhat stunning email from the Brooklyn Museum. In December, Gloria Steinem—the Gloria Steinem; the original Ms., G.L.O.R.I.A.—would be moderating a panel at Elizabeth Sackler’s Center for Feminist Art. The topic was global sex trafficking. Dr. Sackler had read my novel based on the life of prostitute-turned-post-Impressionist…
by Jennifer Cody Epstein Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to travel to Spain for a symposium hosted by the Libraries of Barcelona. Aptly titled Reading to Travel, Traveling to Read (link to the site here), it was comprised of three days of discussions amongst a broad panel of writers that included Marianne Pearl…
by Jennifer Cody Epstein I’ll admit it: my writing sucks. This may seem a surprising confession for a newly-published novelist. And, thankfully, it is not the conclusion most reviewers of my book seem to have reached. (I’ve counted, and the words most often used seem to be luminous and vivid—and who am I to argue?)…