Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is a senior lecturer and the inaugural George R.R. Martin Chair in Storytelling at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. She is a Singaporean novelist, journalist, and the author of the novel "Sarong Party Girls" (William Morrow, 2016) and the memoir "A Tiger In The Kitchen" (Hyperion, 2011). Both books were international bestsellers. She is the co-creator and co-editor of "Anonymous Sex" (Scribner Books, 2022), which was also an international bestseller, and the editor of the anthology "Singapore Noir" (Akashic Books, 2014). The National Arts Council of Singapore has awarded her multiple grants in support of her writing.

Tan began her American journalism career right here at Medill, where she graduated with a BSJ in Journalism. In her 20-plus years in journalism, she's been a staff writer at the Wall Street Journal, focusing on fashion and retail, senior fashion writer at In Style magazine, and senior arts, entertainment and pop culture writer at the Baltimore Sun, where she began her full-time journalism career as a metro news and cops reporter. Her food, fashion, travel and news stories and personal essays have also appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, Bon Appetit, Chicago Tribune, and The (Singapore) Straits Times among other places.

While at the Wall Street Journal, Tan wrote an essay about journeying to Singapore to discover her late grandmother's stories by learning how to cook her dishes. The essay ended up getting turned into the memoir "A Tiger in the Kitchen."

Tan has been an artist in residence at Yaddo, Hawthornden Castle, Le Moulin à Nef, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Headlands Center for the Arts, Ragdale Foundation, The Studios of Key West, the Key West Literary Seminar, and Art OMI's Ledig House among other places. She is currently on the Board of Trustees of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Northern California. An active member of the Asian American Journalists Association, she served on its national board for seven years, ending in 2010.