Emily XR Pan Books in Order

Emily X.R. Pan was born in Illinois to immigrant parents from Taiwan, and she grew up moving around a lot before New York started to feel like home. Storytelling was part of daily life early on. Her father made up bedtime stories on the spot, and her mother, who writes creative nonfiction in Chinese, showed her what it looked like to stay with a sentence until it finally said what you meant.

That kind of childhood leaves a mark.

Pan has said she was inventing stories for as long as she can remember, but her path to publication was not a straight sprint from kid writer to novelist. She studied marketing and international business at NYU Stern, worked in marketing roles in New York and Shanghai, and later returned to NYU for an MFA in fiction. She has also said she was a writer even back when she was in business school, which feels right for someone who seems to have carried stories through every version of her working life.

Her first novel, The Astonishing Color of After, took a long time to find its final shape. It began as a different manuscript, partly inspired by her grandmother's life in colonial Taiwan, and Pan eventually rewrote it from scratch. She also traveled to Taiwan for research and worked closely with family there. The finished book follows Leigh Chen Sanders, a teen who goes to Taiwan after her mother's death and tries to piece together grief, family history, art, and the possibility that magic is real after all. Leigh sees emotion in color, and that visual language gives the book much of its shape.

That book changed things.

When The Astonishing Color of After came out in 2018, it reached the New York Times bestseller list and picked up honors from APALA and the Walter Honor Award, among others. Time later named it one of the 100 Best YA Books of All Time. Readers tend to remember the way it treats grief and depression with patience, and the way Taiwan feels vivid on the page, not as a backdrop but as living family ground. It is also the book that made a lot of readers feel seen in its attention to mixed identity, silence inside families, and the strange work of mourning.

Pan's second novel, An Arrow to the Moon, keeps the emotional stakes high but turns toward myth and doomed romance. Set in 1991, it reimagines the story of Chang'e and Houyi inside a star-crossed love story about Hunter Yee and Luna Chang, two teenagers caught in family expectations, old rivalries, and increasingly eerie events. The book became an instant national bestseller, was a Locus Award finalist, and was featured on NPR's best books of 2022.

Across her fiction, Pan returns to a few steady interests. She writes about teenagers trying to understand who they are, parents and children missing each other even when they love each other deeply, first love, inherited pain, and the shimmer of the unreal inside everyday life. She has said YA readers are unusually open to writers who blur genre, and her work leans into that freedom. Realism, myth, ghosts, color, longing, and family history all have room to sit beside each other in her books. That openness is one reason her novels can feel intimate and strange at the same time.

She has also spent a lot of energy building spaces for other writers. Pan was the founding editor-in-chief of Bodega Magazine, later co-created the Foreshadow platform and anthology with Nova Ren Suma, and has taught creative writing in several settings. Earlier in her career, she also worked in children's book marketing and taught undergraduates and long-term hospital residents. She is currently on the faculty of The New School's MFA program, and has also taught at Harvard, NYU, and Vermont College of Fine Arts.

These days, she divides her time between New York and New Jersey. Outside writing, she makes music and visual art, and by her own account she loves bats, good mooncakes, and training her rescue dog to balance on wobbly things. That mix of seriousness and play feels a lot like her fiction, grounded in real feeling, but never closed off from wonder.