• Bestselling author of ‘The Joy Luck Club’ to speak today at Baylor

    An Afternoon with Amy Tan - Baylor's Beall-Russell Lectures

    Amy Tan has been a fixture on The New York Times bestseller list over the last 25 years, with five bestselling novels to her credit, plus a hit movie, a memoir and two children’s novels. Today, she’s sharing her story on campus with the Baylor community.

    “An Afternoon with Amy Tan” is the featured lecture of Baylor’s 2014 Beall-Russell Lectures in the Humanities series, an event that has annually brought such bestselling and widely-respected authors as Maya Angelou and Bill Moyers to campus since 1982.

    The daughter of a Baptist minister, Tan has an interesting life story to share. After losing her father and brother to brain tumors as a teen, she moved from California to Europe (where she found comfort among hippies) before graduating from a small Baptist college in Oregon. Following her roommate’s murder, she became a language development specialist and freelance business writer before finally finding direction as an author.

    She didn’t start writing fiction until she was 33, but just four years later, her first book, The Joy Luck Club, began a 75-week run on the New York Times bestseller list. Four years after that, it was an award-winning film (with the author herself collaborating on the screenplay). Tan’s list of accolades includes numerous awards; most recently, she was awarded the Lawrence Sanders Award in Fiction earlier this year.

    “An Afternoon with Amy Tan” takes place today at 3:30 p.m. in the Cashion Academic Center in the Hankamer School of Business, and admission is free.

    Sic ’em, Amy Tan and Beall-Russell Lectures!