Amy Tan is the highly acclaimed award winning author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, The Opposite of Fate, and Saving Fish From Drowning, and two children's books, The Moon Lady and Sagwa the Chinese Siamese Cat.

The Joy Luck Club, her first novel published in 1989, immediately rose to the top of the New York Times best-seller list and was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and made into a major motion picture co-produced by Amy Tam with Director Oliver Stone. The Kitchen God's Wife (1991) and The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), were also long-running favorites on the New York Times list. Her short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, McCall's and many other magazines.

Amy was born in Oakland, California, in 1952. Her father, educated in Beijing and an employee of the U. S. Information Services during the war, emigrated to America in 1947. Her mother came to the United States in 1949 and was forced to leave behind three daughters from a previous marriage. Tan grew up in Fresno, Oakland, Berkeley, and in the suburbs of San Francisco. When she was fourteen, her father and older brother both died of brain tumors. Following these tragedies, Amy lived in Europe with her mother and younger brother and graduated from high school in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1969. After earning an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, she worked as a language development consultant with very young disabled children.

Amy went to Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, and there, on a blind date, met her husband, Lou DeMattei. they moved to San Jose, where she enrolled at San Jose City College. She attended San Jose State University, and, while working two part-time jobs, became an English honor's student and a President's Scholar. In 1972, Tan graduated with honors, receiving a B.A. with a double major in English and Linguistics. In 1973, she earned her M.A. in Linguistics from San Jose State University, and then was awarded a Graduate Minority Fellowship under the affirmative action program at the University of California, Berkeley, where she enrolled as a doctoral student in linguistics. She worked as a language development consultant and project director for programs serving disabled children from birth to age five. She then became a freelance business writer specializing in corporate communications for such companies as AT&T, IBM, and Pacific Bell.

In 1986, Tan's first short story, "End Game," appeared in the now defunct magazine, FM Five. The story was later reprinted in Seventeen, which attracted the attention of literary agent, Sandra Dijkstra, who encouraged Tan to continue writing fiction. When Tan had completed three stories, her agent submitted them, along with a proposal for a collection, which was bought by editor Faith Sale at G.P. Putnam's Sons. In 1989, The Joy Luck Club was published and, through word-of-mouth endorsements by independent booksellers, became a surprise bestseller, logging more than 40 weeks on the New York Times list. It was nominated for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Award. It received the Commonwealth Gold Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. It was adapted into a feature film in 1994, for which Tan was a co-screenwriter with Ron Bass and a co-producer with Bass and Wayne Wang.

Tan's second book, The Kitchen God's Wife, was published in 1991, followed by The Hundred Secret Senses in 1995, and The Bonesetter's Daughter in 2001. All three books appeared on The New York Times bestseller list. Her first work of non-fiction," The Opposite of Fate" was published in 2003, and most her recent novel Saving Fish From Drowning in 2005. San Francisco Opera is currently producing an opera based on Amy's novel Bonesetter's Daughter for the 2008 season.

Amy's short stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Grand Street, Harper's, The New Yorker, Threepenny Review, Ski, and others. Her essay, "Mother Tongue" was chosen for Best American Essays in 1991 and has been widely anthologized. Tan's books are often included as part of the multicultural curriculum of high schools and colleges, an honor which caused her much ambivalence and led her to writing a speech, "Required Reading and Other Dangerous Subjects," which she has since delivered in universities across the country. She is the editor for the 1999 edition of Best American Short Stories. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Catalan, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, Russian, Estonian, Serbo-Croation, Czech, Polish, Hebrew, Greek, Romanian, Tagalog, Malaysian, and Indonesian.

In addition, Tan has written two children's books, The Moon Lady (1992) and The Chinese Siamese Cat (1994). The latter became a children's television series for PBS called "Sagwa," and is also part of a symphony program of words and music produced and conducted by George Daughtery. Along with novelist Stephen King and columnist Dave Barry, Tan is a member of the literary garage band, the Rock Bottom Remainders, for which she sings the Nancy Sinatra classic, "These Boots Are Made for Walking," to raise money for America Scores, a after-school literacy program for inner city kids. Tan's rendition of the pop culture classic can be heard on the CD album, "Stranger than Fiction," which benefits the PEN Writers Fund.

Amy Tan lives in Sausalito and New York with her husband, Lou DeMattei, and their two canine companions, Bubba and Lilli.