Wayne E. Yang grew up in South Carolina, where he learned to eat grits the proper way: smothered with butter and sprinkled with salt. You can imagine his horror when he went to graduate school in upstate New York and saw people eating their grits with milk and sugar. His writing has appeared in The North American Review, The Christian Science Monitor, The Asian Review of Books and other publications. He studied creative writing at the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts, journalism at the University of South Carolina and literature at Cornell University.