Jay Caspian Kang

Jay Caspian Kang (born December 31, 1979) is an American writer, editor, television journalist and podcast host. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Previously he was an editor of Grantland, a reporter for The New York Times Magazine, and a columnist for The New York Timess opinion section. He was also an Emmy-nominated correspondent on Vice News Tonight and cohosts the podcast Time to Say Goodbye. His debut novel The Dead Do Not Improve was released by the Hogarth/Random House in the summer of 2012. In 2021, he published The Loneliest Americans, a memoir and reported work examining Asian American identity.

Early life and education Kang was born in Seoul, South Korea, on New Year's Eve 1979. He chose his own middle name at the age of eight, inspired by the character of Prince Caspian from The Chronicles of Narnia. He grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while his father did post-doctoral work in organic chemistry at Harvard University, and in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He received his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College and received his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from Columbia University in 2005.

Career Early career After receiving his MFA, Kang spent a number of years in San Francisco and Los Angeles teaching creative writing and world history. Kang has continued to write about race throughout his career, with "A significant majority of Kang's columns, television segments, and magazine features hav[ing] a central focus on the role of race in culture." for his work, "The High is Always the Pain and the Pain is Always the High", a lengthy first-person essay concerning his gambling addiction. The work has been seen as a turning point in Kang's career. The book was summarized by Kirkus Book Reviews as a "Pynchon-esque menagerie of California surfers, cops, thugs and dot-com workers [that] converge in a comic anti-noir." The book revolves around a disgruntled MFA graduate named Philip Kim, who discovers that his elderly neighbor has been murdered, and who soon becomes the unlikely protagonist of a quickly unfolding mystery involving a struggle between fictionalized versions of two San Francisco institutions: Cafe Gratitude and Kink.com. Kang has said that he wanted to write the book about Korean American male anger and reflect on how Seung-Hui Cho, the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech shooting, was also Korean. as civil rights correspondent, appearing on HBO's Vice News Tonight. He was nominated for an Emmy Award for a 2016 segment of the show on high school students joining the national anthem protests of police brutality. and then served as editor of the science and technology blog Elements at The New Yorker from April to November 2014.

In the spring of 2020, Kang began co-hosting the podcast Time to Say Goodbye with E. Tammy Kim and Andrew B. Liu. Begun during the COVID-19 pandemic to discuss the pandemic in an international context, Time to Say Goodbye expanded to cover past and current events relevant to Asian and Asian American culture, politics, as well as general left-wing politics. Later in the year he published The Loneliest Americans, a part memoir, part reported work on Asian American experience. It was named to NPR and Time's lists of best books of 2021.

In September 2022, ESPN Films announced that production was complete on a 30 for 30 documentary on Michael Chang, directed by Kang. The documentary, called American Son, was about Chang's 1989 French Open run and the coinciding Tiananmen Square massacre. In May 2023, Kang tweeted that ESPN had postponed the documentary's release to July 2024, pulling it from its world premiere at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival. In a pre-festival roundup, Variety had called the film "an astute, incisive directorial debut" for Kang.

Personal life

Kang is a thyroid cancer survivor.

Kang is married and lives in Berkeley, California. His daughter was born in January 2017.