Marie Lee


Marie Myung-Ok Lee is a Korean-American author and essayist.
Her stories and essays have been published in The Atlantic, Witness, The Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Newsweek, Slate and The New York Times. She has received honors for her work including an O. Henry honorable mention for an adaptation of a chapter from Somebody's Daughter and was a recipient of the MacColl Johnson literature fellowship and 2010 Fiction Fellowship from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts.
Lee has been a Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, and VCCA fellow has served as a National Book Award judge and has taught fiction writing at Yale University. She is a founder and former Board President of the Asian American Writers' Workshop. She currently teaches at Brown University, and she is an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where she teaches creative writing. She is married to Karl Jacoby, an environmental historian at Columbia University, and lives in New York City.
Lee's novel, Somebody's Daughter, is based on her year as a Fulbright Scholar to South Korea, taking oral histories of Korean birth mothers. She has been involved in the adoptee community for many years, but Lee herself is not adopted. One of her family members is adopted from Korea.