May 16
Convocation with Marie Myung-Ok Lee
Marie Myung-Ok Lee is an acclaimed Korean-American writer and author of the novels The Evening Hero (Simon & Schuster, 2022) and Somebody's Daughter (Beacon Press, 2006). She is one of fifty journalists who’s been granted a visa to North Korea since the Korean War. She was the first Fulbright Scholar to Korea in creative writing and has received many honors for her work, including an O. Henry honorable mention, the Best Book Award from the Friends of American Writers, a Rhode Island State Council on the Arts fiction fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fiction fellowship. She has also written many successful Young Adult novels as Marie G. Lee.
Her stories and essays have been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Guernica, and The Guardian, among others. Her work frequently engages with immigration, with the effects of partition on Koreans and the Korean diaspora, and the hardship her mother endured to escape her war-torn homeland for a better life in the US.
Lee graduated from Brown University and was a Writer in Residence there, before she began teaching at Columbia University's Writing Division. She has been a Yaddo and MacDowell Colony fellow and has served as a judge for the National Book Award and the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. In addition, Ms. Lee is a founder of the Asian American Writers' Workshop. She lives in New York City.