Anelise Chen

Anelise Chen is the author of Clam Down: A Metamorphosis, a 2026 Pulitzer Finalist in Memoir or Autobiography, a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection, and named one of the best books of the year by Chicago Tribune, Vulture, and Electric Lit. Based on her stint as the Paris Review’s “mollusk correspondent, Clam Down is a hybrid memoir about a woman who turns into a clam, and goes on a quest to learn more about her clam-lineage, including interviews with her father who disappeared for a decade to write a mysterious accounting software he called Shell Computing.

Chen is a 5 under 35 Honoree from the National Book Foundation. Her experimental novel So Many Olympic Exertions (2017), a meditation on winning and losing, failure and perseverance, was a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She has written most recently about trees, birds, parking lots, and talking vegetables for venues like The Atlantic, Believer Magazine, McSweeney’s, Arnoldia, and The Baffler. She is an Associate Professor of Fiction at Columbia University, and lives with her family in New Haven, Connecticut.