Biography

Lan Cao was born in Saigon, Vietnam. At the end of the war and the defeat of South Vietnam in 1975, she fled with her family to the United States, resettling in Northern Virginia.

She attended Mount Holyoke College and Yale Law School. After law school, she clerked for the legendary Judge Constance Baker Motley, who was the first African American female judge to serve on the federal judiciary. Before her appointment to the federal judiciary, Judge Motley was a key figure in the civil rights movement, winning nine of the ten cases she argued before the US Supreme Court resulting in the desegregation of Southern schools, buses, and lunch counters.

While working at a major Wall Street law firm, Lan wrote a critically acclaimed novel, Monkey Bridge, published by Viking. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote this of Monkey Bridge, “Cao has not only made an impressive debut, but joined authors such as Salman Rushdie and Bharati Mukherjee in mapping the state of exile and its elusive geographies of loss and hope.”

She is also the author of The Lotus and the Storm, published in 2015 by Viking and co-author of Family in Six Tones: A Refugee Mother, an American Daughter, also published by Viking in 2020.