Don Lee

Photo credit: Michele McDonald

Don Lee is the author of the new novel, Country of Origin, and the short story collection, Yellow, which won the 2002 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named by Publishers Weekly as one of the best fiction titles of 2001. Stories from the book received an O. Henry Award and a Pushcart Prize.

His short fiction has been published in GQ, Manoa, The Gettysburg Review, The North American Review, Bamboo Ridge, Glimmer Train, New England Review, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. His short nonfiction and book reviews have appeared in The Village Voice, Boston magazine, Agni, The Improper Bostonian, Harvard Review, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and Short Story Criticism.

He has been the recipient of fiction fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the St. Botolph Club Foundation, and a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction.

He has worked as the full-time editor of the literary journal Ploughshares in Boston since 1988. He has also been an independent consultant for numerous literary magazines and organizations, including The Georgia Review, Asian Pacific American Journal, and the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses. A member of PEN American Center, he has served on the Executive Board and the Diversity Committee of PEN New England, and as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Vermont Council on the Arts.

A third-generation Korean American and the son of a career State Department officer, he spent his childhood in Tokyo and Seoul. He received his B.A. in literature from UCLA, and his M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College, where he subsequently taught for four years and where he was recently a Visiting Writer.

Don Lee's homepage: http://www.don-lee.com/