Don Lee
Novelist

Wrack and Ruin
Norton, 2008

Country of Origin
Norton, 2004

Yellow
Norton, 2001

Don Lee is a third-generation Korean American. He is the author of 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 an O. Henry Award and a Pushcart Prize, and his stories have been published GQ, New England Review, The North American Review, The Gettysburg Review, Bamboo Ridge, Manoa, American Short Fiction, Glimmer Train, Charlie Chan Is Dead 2, Screaming Monkeys, Narrative, and elsewhere. His book reviews and essays have appeared in The Boston Globe, Harvard Review, Agni, Boston magazine, The Village Voice, and other magazines. He has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the St. Botolph Club Foundation. 

He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has been the editor of the literary journal Ploughshares at Emerson College in Boston for 17 years. 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. After graduating, he taught fiction writing workshops at Emerson for three years as an adjunct instructor, then began working full-time at Ploughshares. He is now an occasional writer-in-residence in Emerson's M.F.A. program.

His hobbies are windsurfing and bicycling.