YIMING MA
Photo credit: Emma Norman Photography
NEWS: My debut novel These Memories Do Not Belong to Us is forthcoming via McClelland & Stewart (Penguin Random House) in Canada and Mariner (HarperCollins) in the United States in fall 2025! For inquires, please contact Michelle Brower of Trellis Agency, who represents all my work + say hi on Instagram.
Born in Shanghai, I write from Toronto and Tokyo. I feel grateful to be a graduate of the Stanford MBA program, where I was an Arjay Miller Scholar, and the Warren Wilson MFA program, where I was the Carol Houck Smith Scholar.
My stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, the Florida Review, Ricepaper and 4th Estate. My story “Swimmer of Yangtze” won the 2018 Guardian 4th Estate Story Prize. My stories have been shortlisted for the Gulf Coast Prize, Ploughshares Emerging Writers Contest, Geist CanLit Prize, LitMag Virginia Woolf Prize, Florida Review Editors' Prize, and Commonwealth Prize. I have been awarded residencies and conferences from Sewanee Writers' Conference, VQR Writers' Conference and the Vermont Studio Center.
Beyond writing, I have served as Chief of Staff to senior leaders at mid-stage startups such as Wealthsimple and Rokt. Before that, I worked at Pearson growing affordable schools for low-income families in Africa and was a consultant at McKinsey.