Aili Mu is a Professor of Chinese at Iowa State University. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Stony Brook (1996). She teaches courses on Chinese language, translation, Chinese cultural tradition and China today. Her research focus is on Chinese short-short stories. Her published scholarship on the genre earns her a Franklin R. Buchanan Prize from the Association for Asian Studies (2018). She is currently working on a project that builds cultural literacy about Chinese civilization through the short-short genre.