Bio
Short Bio:
Don Lee's most recent book, the story collection The Partition, was published by Akashic Books and longlisted for The Story Prize. He is also the author of the collection Yellow and the novels Country of Origin, Wrack and Ruin, The Collective, and Lonesome Lies Before Us. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. He lives near Baltimore with his wife, the writer Jane Delury.
Media: Click on these thumbnails for 300-dpi files of the cover and author photo (credit: Jane Delury):
Long Bio:
Don Lee's most recent book, the story collection The Partition, was published by Akashic Books and longlisted for The Story Prize. He is also the author of novel Lonesome Lies Before Us; the novel The Collective, which won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature from the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association; the novel Wrack and Ruin, which was a finalist for the Thurber Prize; the novel Country of Origin, which won an American Book Award, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and a Mixed Media Watch Image Award for Outstanding Fiction; and the story collection Yellow, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Members Choice Award from the Asian American Writers' Workshop.
He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an O. Henry Award, and a Pushcart Prize, and his stories have been published in One Story, The Sewanee Review, VQR, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, GQ, The Gettysburg Review, Manoa, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. His book reviews and essays have appeared in LitHub, Electric Literature, The Stranger, The Boston Globe, Harvard Review, Boston magazine, The Village Voice, and other magazines. He has received fellowships from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Massachusetts Cultural Council and residencies from Yaddo and the Lannan Foundation.
For many years, he was the principal editor of the literary journal Ploughshares. From 2009-2024, he taught in the MFA program at Temple University.
He is a third-generation Korean American. The son of a career State Department officer, he spent the majority of his childhood in Tokyo and Seoul. In Tokyo, he attended ASIJ—the American School in Japan. He received his B.A. in English literature from UCLA and his M.F.A. in creative writing and literature from Emerson College.
He is married to the fiction writer Jane Delury and lives near Baltimore.
Photo by Marc van Swoll
Credit for home splash page photo: Melissa Frost