Congratulations to Ha Jin (Jin Xuefei) on his appointment as William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor

Congratulations to Prof. Ha Jin (Jin Xuefei)

on his appointment as William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, announced by Boston University President Robert Brown on April 29, 2019.

President Brown’s announcement letter includes the following:

“A 1994 graduate of Boston University’s Creative Writing Program, Xuefei Jin (pen name Ha Jin) returned to the Department of English in 2002 as a full professor. Born in China, he was a teenager when China entered the Cultural Revolution and he became a member of the People’s Liberation Army at the age of 14, an experience he would later revisit in his written work. He was studying in the United States at the time of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and suppression and realized at that time that he would be unable to return to China. His work examines themes of exile, immigration, and the now ever-present global experience of movement among cultures; his course “The Writer as Exile” is a key element of the international focus of the University’s Creative Writing Program. His novel Waiting, based on his experiences in the Red Army, was awarded the National Book Award for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize (as was his novel War Trash in 2005). His newest books are A Distant Center (2018) and his first nonfiction book, The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai (2019). His work has been translated into more than 30 languages. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ha Jin received his BA from Heilongjiang University and his master’s from Shandong University, both in China, and in 1986 came to the United States to earn his PhD at Brandeis.“