Award-winning writer and current Professor of Creative Writing Yiyun Li has been named Princeton University’s Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities, an appointment first held by Professor of Creative Writing, Emerita, Toni Morrison. A member of Princeton’s Program in Creative Writing faculty since 2017, Li’s appointment began on September 28.
“Yiyun is a writer of incomparable skill,” said Stacy Wolf, acting chair of the Lewis Center. “Her voice is at once astonishingly varied across a range of styles and distinctive in its precision and wit. Her writing is both economical and luminous, taking readers to places and states of being that we never could have imagined before. Yiyun is also a brilliant teacher and a dedicated and engaged colleague. We are very lucky to have her as a professor in the Lewis Center.”
Professor of Creative Writing Yiyun Li, Princeton’s recently appointed Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities. Photo credit: ©Basso CANNARSA / Opale
Li is the author of twelve books, including Things in Nature Merely Grow, which is a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Nonfiction; Wednesday’s Child, a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; The Book of Goose; Where Reasons End; Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life; and Tolstoy Together, 85 Days of War and Peace with Yiyun Li. Her work has been translated into more than 20 languages. Li’s honors and awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Windham Campbell Prize, a 2023 International Writer Award from the Royal Society of Literature, the 2021 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Benjamin H. Dank Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the Asian American Literary Award for fiction, and others. She is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, an independent film directed by Wayne Wang and adapted by Li from her short story, was the winner of Golden Shell for best film at the 55th San Sebastian International Film Festival.
“I am honored by this recognition,” said Li. “That Toni Morrison was the first Princeton professor to hold the chair is tremendously meaningful. I cannot think of a more inspiring encouragement and support from the University, the Dean of Faculty, and Lewis Center for the Arts than this appointment.”
At Princeton Li has taught introductory and advanced level courses in fiction and special topics courses such as “Reading Like a Writer,” “Writing from Life,” and “Autobiography: Writing Our Selves.” From 2019 through spring 2025 she served as director of the Program in Creative Writing.
The Robert F. Goheen Professorship in the Humanities was established in 1986 in honor of Goheen (1919-2008), Class of 1940 and president of the University from 1956 to 1972. Goheen was a professor of classics who as president led Princeton through a time of societal change in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the introduction of undergraduate coeducation, implementing measures to attract a more racially and ethnically diverse group of students and faculty, and establishing Princeton as an internationally recognized research university. Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison held the professorship from 1989 through 2006, succeeded by Professor of Classics Brooke Holmes from 2016-2021.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the Program in Creative Writing, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events presented by the Lewis Center each year, most of them free.
