Brian Leung’s newest book is A Terrifying Brush with Optimism (Sarabande, February 2025). He is the author of Take Me Home (HarperCollins) which was a recipient of a Willa Award for Historical Fiction, World Famous Love Acts (Sarabande Books), Ivy vs Dogg: With a Cast of Thousands! (C&R Press), All I Should Not Tell (C&R Press),  and the well-received novel, Lost Men (Random House). In 2012 Lambda Literary Foundation presented him with its Mid-Career Novelist Award. Brian’s fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous anthologies as well as Story, Always Crashing, Honey Literary, Crazyhorse, Grain, Gulf Coast, Kinesis, The Barcelona Review, Mid-American Review, Salt Hill, Gulf Stream, River City, Runes, The Bellingham Review, Hyphen, Velocity, The Connecticut Review, Blithe House Quarterly, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, Crowd, and in the anthologies, Who’s Yer Daddy, The Habit of Art, Law and Disorder, A Flame Called Indiana, and Altered States. He is also the co-author of the non-fiction humor title, Not Another Feel Good Singles Book. 

For six years Professor Leung worked with the U.S. Department of State Institute on Contemporary U.S. Literature where, in his final year, he served as Principal Investigator and Director. He is a recipient of the University of Louisville’s President’s Award for Outstanding Scholarship, Research, and Creative Activity, and a College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Research and Creative Activity Award at that same institution.  He previously served as Director of Creative Writing at Purdue University where he is a professor in the Department of English. A native of California, he received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Indiana University.