Wendy Bashant

Traveler, Teacher, Writer

Wendy Bashant taught and served for over thirty years as a college dean and professor before accepting a teaching position in China. Her writing includes scholarly articles, book chapters, poetry, and travel articles. She was a finalist for both the Peter Taylor Prize for Literature and the Gival Press Novel Award. A graduate of Middlebury College (BA) and University of Rochester (PhD), she currently serves as an adult literacy tutor and lives in San Diego with her husband and two cats.

Contact email: bashantw [at] gmail.com

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“… a sensitive, nuanced glimpse of China, written by an author who is widely travelled and knows what to look for. The most important feature of SAME BRIGHT MOON is that it is not filtered through the prism of Chinese studies, but instead is drawn by a teacher, gifted at helping students discover what concerns them in their young lives. A must read for anyone interested in China's future leaders ...”

--Dr. Robert Drexler, author of Phaulkon-esque: Poems of Arrival and Departure and Suvannaphoum: Poems from the Golden Land, and Prof Emeritus of the Coe Asia program,

“Wendy Bashant's "collaborative memoir" couldn't be more timely. Her strongly voiced narrative of teaching Chinese university students in Xi'an, coupled with their own vivid accounts of struggle and aspiration, offers an indispensable, and a humanizing, complement to the daily news. “

-- Dr. John Elder, author of Following the Brush, and a professor emeritus of English and Environmental Studies at Middlebury and Bread Loaf.

Praise & Reviews

“Bashant retells the story of her experience of Covid lockdown in China as a slow-moving car crash. Relatable in its humanity, The Same Bright Moon is a story complicated by the fact that Bashant and her husband are literally fish out of water. Having arrived in Xi’an from America around the same time as China closed its borders for three long years, Bashant serves as a reliably complex narrator. A stranger in a strange land, she observes Covid as a foreigner in a moment when all of us, no matter where we live, are experiencing something entirely foreign: a global pandemic. Through her students and her own day to day, Bashant finds a basic humanity connecting us all. Even better, she articulates it in a way that is compelling and at its core, unifying.”

Joselin Linder, author of The Family Gene