Esmé Weijun Wang is the author of the New York Times-bestselling essay collection The Collected Schizophrenias and the novel The Border of Paradise, which was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2016. She won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize (2016), was named by Granta as one of the “Best of Young American Novelists” in their decennial list (2017), received a 2018 Whiting Award, and was anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2018. Born in the American Midwest to Taiwanese parents, she lives in San Francisco. Wang is the founder of The Unexpected Shape Writing Academy for ambitious writers living with limitations and she can be found at esmewang.com.

The essay collection that she will develop at Camargo, her second work of non-fiction, will consider the unexpected shape that our lives take when we realize the boundaries that exist around it. Many of the essays, like in The Collected Schizophrenias, will have a personal slant; however, all of them emerge out of a curiosity about the ways people raised to strive in Western late capitalism discover the limitations of that striving particularly when the limitations result from living with illness.