Leonard Chang was born in New York City, and grew up on Long Island, where he attended the public schools in Merrick. After high school, Leonard studied at Dartmouth College, interned with the Peace Corps in Kingston, Jamaica, and continued his studies in Philosophy at Harvard University, where he graduated with honors. He attended the graduate creative writing program at the University of California at Irvine, and received his Master’s of Fine Arts.

His first novel, entitled The Fruit ‘N Food, was published in 1996 and won the Black Heron Press Award for Social Fiction that year, and is now taught at universities around the world.

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His second novel, Dispatches from the Cold, won a San Francisco Bay Guardian Goldie Award for Literature.

He is also the author of a popular and critically acclaimed noir trilogy, which includes Over the Shoulder, Underkill, and Fade to Clear, a USA Today Summer Reading Pick and a finalist for the Shamus Award.

Crossings, his sixth, was published in 2009, and a new novel, Triplines, was released in 2014. His latest novel, The Lockpicker was released in 2017.

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His novels have been translated into French, Japanese and Korean, and are regularly studied in literature, sociology and theology courses throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. Recently the U.S. Consulate in Berlin sponsored his multi-city lecture/reading tour of Germany.