Larissa Lai (born 1967) is an American-born Canadian novelist and literary critic. She is a recipient of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and Lambda Literary Foundation's 2020 Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize. Biography Born in La Jolla, California, she grew up in St. John's, Newfoundland. She attended the University of British Columbia and, in 1990, graduated with a B.A. in Sociology. Subsequently, she earned her MA from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and in 2006, her PhD from the University of Calgary. She is currently an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary, where she directs The Insurgent Architects' House for Creative Writing. Formerly she was an Associate Professor in Canadian Literature in the English Department at the University of British Columbia, where she was also an active committee member of the reading series Play Chthonics at UBC's Green College, and edited poetry for the journal Canadian Literature from 2007 to 2010. A Chinese-Canadian, she has been cited as an example of "the growing elasticity of Canadian fiction and Canadian identity". Her first novel When Fox is a Thousand was published in 1995 by Press Gang Publishers and shortlisted for the 1996 Books in Canada First Novel Award. When Fox Is a Thousand was republished by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2004, slightly revised, and with a new Afterword. Her second novel Salt Fish Girl was published in 2002 by Thomas Allen, and shortlisted for the Otherwise Award, the Sunburst Award and the City of Calgary W. O. Mitchell Award. From 1997 to 1998 she was the Canadian Writer-in-Residence at the Calgary Distinguished Writers Program at University of Calgary, and was writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University in 2006. She was awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at UBC in 2006-2007. Lai has twice been an instructor at Clarion West science fiction and fantasy writer's workshop in 2004 and 2007. She was also an instructor at the original Clarion workshop at UCSD in 2009. She has published articles and criticism in journals such as West Coast Line, Canadian Literature, The Capilano Review, English Studies in Canada and Fuse Magazine, as well as several anthologies including Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography and Bringing it Home: Women Talk About Feminism in Their Lives. In 2014, she published a non-fiction work, Slanting I, Imagining