About

Ann Tashi Slater’s work has been published by The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, AGNI, Catapult, Granta, and the HuffPost, among others. Her writing also appears in Women in Clothes (Penguin) and American Dragons (HarperCollins); her translation of fiction by Reinaldo Arenas was published in Old Rosa (Grove). Her work includes a novel related to the Tibetan after-death "bardo" journey and her family history, and a memoir-in-progress about a modern-day pilgrimage to India. Future projects include a book chronicling a vanishing Tibet, with photos taken when Ann traveled to Tibet in the mid-eighties.

Ann was born in Spain, lived for a year in Darjeeling and Kathmandu, and then moved to the States. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Princeton and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. Her travels and work have taken her around the world, to places including France, Spain, Mexico, Cuba, Thailand, and Bali. A longtime resident of Tokyo, she teaches at a Japanese university.

Featured Work

Teatime in Darjeeling

2017, 2018

An essay about reconnecting with my Tibetan roots (Tin House 74 & Tin House Online). Featured in Lit Hub (8/22/2018), and a Notable in Best American Essays 2018, ed. Hilton Als.

"Bringing water to a boil, waiting for the leaves to brew, pouring the tea into a cup and milk into the tea (only a drop, so the taste isn’t diluted), I’m doing what my Tibetan family has done for over a century. The earthy notes of the amber liquid conjure the wool-and-camphor smell of our Darjeeling house, the odor of butter lamps and incense in the altar room. They make me feel connected to the land itself: 28,000-foot Mount Kanchenjunga, soaring over the town; sacred Observatory Hill, where our family feasted at Losar New Year; the dusky waters of the Teesta River, where my grandparents’ ashes were scattered..."

Other Works

  • Summer in Tokyo: Rain Women, Cicadas, and Visits from the Dead (Catapult monthly column)

    2019

  • Traveling in Bardo (AGNI & AGNI Online)

    2017, 2018

  • Writing and The Tibetan Book of the Dead (AGNI Blog)

    2017

  • Driving to Shangri-La (Flock)

    2017

  • Japan and the Happiness of Melancholy (HuffPost)

    2016

  • Tibetan Butter Tea and Pink Gin (Kyoto Journal)

    2015

  • Fata Morgana: Reinaldo Arenas, Writers in Exile, and a Visit to the Havana of 1987 (Paris Review Daily)

    2014

  • Flowers Would Fall from the Sky Like Rain (Asia Literary Review)

    2014

  • The Literature of Uprootedness: An Interview with Reinaldo Arenas (The New Yorker: Page-Turner)

    2013

  • Gypsy Cante (New World Writing)

    2013

  • Things You Dreamed of and Things You Didn't (Big Bridge)

    2013

  • Travelers (Gulf Coast)

    2012

  • The Open World (Shenandoah)

    2011

  • There's No Reason to Get Romantic (in AMERICAN DRAGONS, HarperCollins)

    1993

  • Old Rosa (trans. from Spanish; in OLD ROSA, Grove Press)

    1989

Awards and Recognition

  • "Teatime in Darjeeling" (Tin House 74, Winter 2017) is a Notable in Best American Essays 2018, ed. Hilton Als.