Helen Wan

Helen Wan is a media lawyer, educator, and author who writes about our complicated relationship with career ambition and the idea of "success." Helen's debut novel, “The Partner Track," is the story of an Asian American lawyer at an elite global firm who is pursuing the American Dream. Her novel was a Book Club selection of REAL SIMPLE Magazine and The National Association of Women Lawyers, and became the subject of a Washington Post Magazine cover story about Asian Americans shattering glass ceilings in the corporate workplace.

“The Partner Track” was adapted for television and is now streaming as an original TV series on Netflix. The book has also been translated into five languages, and is now taught in colleges and law schools, and used by many companies, schools, and other organizations in initiatives to advance equity and career success in the workplace and academic settings.

Wan is a graduate of Amherst College and The University of Virginia School of Law, where, as a student, she wrote a column for The Law Weekly and where, more recently, she served as the Commencement Speaker in May 2023. After graduation, Wan practiced law in New York City at Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison, the entertainment law firm Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, and as in-house counsel at media companies including Time Inc. (then a division of TimeWarner), A+E Television Networks, and Hachette Book Group USA, where she was VP & Associate General Counsel.

Wan currently teaches Media Law at NYU, and serves on the Board of Trustees of The Vermont Studio Center and the Board of Advisors of the New York Women's Bar Association Foundation. She has also served on The Amherst College Executive Committee and the Board of Advisors of The Asian American Arts Alliance, and taught fiction-writing at The Asian American Writers' Workshop and The Writers' Circle in New Jersey.

When not writing or lawyering, Wan enjoys 90s nostalgia, classic Hitchcock films, SNL, reading all kinds of books, and making her young kid laugh. After many years in Brooklyn, she now lives in New Jersey with her family, where she is at work on a new book.