Jennifer Cody Epstein is the author of The Gods of Heavenly Punishment, winner of the 2014 APALA (Asian Pacific American Librarians Association) Honor Award, and the international bestseller The Painter from Shanghai, which has been translated into 16 languages. She has degrees from Amherst College, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Columbia University, where she earned her MFA in fiction and is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor of Creative Writing. She has also worked in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bangkok and New York, and written for The Wall Street Journal, The Asian Wall Street Journal, Self, Vogue, Mademoiselle and the NBC News networks.