Megan Shank is a freelance writer and translator, Mandarin Chinese tutor, and Asia co-editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Most recently, she served as managing editor for East View Information Service’s The Current Digest of the Chinese Press. Shank’s work has appeared in Newsweek International, The Daily Beast, Prospect, Ms., Bloomberg News, The Washington Post, Miller-McCune, Archaeology, The San Antonio Express-News, CNN.com, The South China Morning Post, The American Lawyer, and Global Journalist, among others. Shank wrote a chapter for Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land (University of California Press, September 2012). Her writing is also featured in the first edition of McGraw-Hill College’s Women Worldwide: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Women (March 2010). She has worked as a researcher and translator for ChinaVitae.com and has made guest appearances on NPR and Pacifica Radio and spoken at the Asia Society. She has blogged for the Huffington Post and Ms. and reported for a short documentary film about Chinese youth and pollution produced by Pearson Education. Working with Newsweek International and a Hong Kong partner, Shank helped establish Newsweek Select, the Chinese-language edition of Newsweek. As a senior editor, she trained Chinese and Western reporters, edited Chinese and English-language pieces, developed new sections, translated Chinese copy into English for the New York office’s review, and orchestrated a pan-Asian Newsweek foreign editions conference. During her spare time, Shank co-wrote, produced, and co-directed the Shanghai-staged play Impulse and used proceeds to create a scholarship for a Chinese woman in the arts. During her six-year residency in China, before her years at Newsweek Select, she performed with a Chinese jazz group, recorded cartoon voices for a Japanese educational company, taught kindergarten, and coached a high school girls’ basketball team. As Shanghai editor at Ringier AG, a Swiss media company, Shank produced the biweekly Shanghai City Weekend, the quarterlies Parents & Kids and Home & Office, and the annual Shanghai Bar & Restaurant Guide.
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
Childhood Revisionism
What happens when your childhood memories don't match your family's official narrative?...
Violent Expressions of the Imperialist Conquest
Peipei Qiu speaks with LARB about Chinese “comfort women” during World War II....
Lies in Ink, Facts in Blood
Memory is dangerous in a country that was built to function on national amnesia....
PODCAST #56: Helen Wan, "The Partner Track"
Photo: Anna Campanelli Helen Wan is the author of The Partner Track, a novel about a Chinese-American woman navigating corporate America ...
China and the Nobel IV
Part IV of our series on China and the Nobel Prize for Literature. LARB's Asia editors Megan Shank and Jeffrey Wasserstrom ...
China and the Nobel III
On Gao Xingjiang and Lu Xun...
China and the Nobel Prize II
LARB's Asia editors Megan Shank and Jeffrey Wasserstrom asked a number of prominent writers and critics to discuss their choices for ...
The Challenges of Conveying Absurd Reality: An Interview with Chinese Writer Yu Hua
As the Nobel awards approached, the Asia editors at Los Angeles Review of Books wanted to check in with Yu Hua, ...
Jittery Nation: Link, Maden, and Pickowicz’s “Restless China”
There’s a lot to be nervous about in the new China, as Perry Link and his colleagues show....
