Jay Caspian Kang

Kang was born in Seoul, South Korea on New Year's Eve.[2] He grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He received his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College[3] and received his Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from Columbia University in 2005.[2]

After receiving his MFA, Kang spent a number of years in San Francisco and Los Angeles teaching creative writing and world history.[2] He says he spent more than 40 hours a week playing poker at the Commerce Casino during this time.[2] In January 2010, Kang began writing for literary basketball blog FreeDarko. In his first contribution to the blog, "The Lives of Others," Kang wrote an analysis of how Chinese-American basketball player Jeremy Lin and Chinese-American rapper MC Jin "offered an alternative interpretation of what it meant to be an Asian-American."[2] He asserted that Asian-Americans "have been conditioned our entire lives to imagine White," and that "Like Jin before him, what Jeremy Lin represents is a re-conception of our bodies, a visible measure of how the emasculated Asian-American body might measure up to the mythic legion of Big Black supermen."[4] 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."[2]

Kang was subsequently noticed in 2010 by several prominent editors[2][5][6][7] 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 Kang's career.[2]

Kang's debut novel The Dead Do Not Improve was released in 2012 by Hogarth/Random House.[8] 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."[9] 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.[1] Kang has said that he wanted to write the book about Korean American male anger and reflect on how the Virginia Tech shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, was also Korean.[3]

Kang joined Vice in June 2016[10] as civil rights correspondent,[11] appearing on HBO's "Vice News Tonight".[12] He is also a writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine.[12] Previously he was a founding editor of the ESPN sports and pop-culture blog Grantland,[13] and then served as editor of the science and technology blog Elements at The New Yorker from April to November 2014.[14]

Kang is a thyroid cancer survivor.[2] He has remarked that "Surviving cancer can cleanse the soul, sure, but once you're left facing the rest of your life, a patient's vision can tunnel down to a list of demands."[15]

Kang is married and currently lives in New York.[1][16][2] He has a daughter who was born in January 2017.[2]

• An interview with Jay Caspian Kang on Notebook on Cities and Culture
• An interview with Jay Caspian Kang by Karen K. Ho for the Columbia Journalism Review