Alexander Chee

Alexander Chee (born August 21, 1967) is an American fiction writer, poet, journalist and reviewer. His critically acclaimed debut novel, Edinburgh, was awarded the Asian American Writers Workshop Literary Award, the Lambda Editor's Choice Prize, and the Michener/Copernicus Fellowship Prize. In 2003, Out named Chee one of their 100 Most Influential People of the year.

Early life and education Born in Rhode Island, he spent his childhood in South Korea, Kauai, Truk, Guam and Maine. He attended Wesleyan University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Career Chee's short fiction appeared in the anthologies Best American Erotica 2007, A Fictional History of the US (With Huge Chunks Missing), Men on Men 2000, His 3, and his personal essays in Out, From Boys To Men, Loss Within Loss, Boys Like Us, The M Word, and The Man I Might Become. His essay "I, Reader" was selected for inclusion in the Notable Essays list of the 2011 edition of the Best American Essays, and his essay "Girl," was included in Best American Essays 2016.

His short stories and essays have also appeared in magazines and journals such as The New York Times Book Review, Tin House, Slate, Guernica, NPR. Chee's poetry has appeared in Barrow Street, LIT, Interview, the James White Review, and XXX Fruit. He has written journalism and reviews for The New York Times, Time Out New York, Out/Look, OutWeek, The Advocate, Out, Bookforum and the San Francisco Review of Books.

He was also the recipient of the 2003 Whiting Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship, and a 2010 Massachusetts Cultural Council of the Arts Fellowship, as well as residency fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Civitella Ranieri, and Leidig House. and currently serves on the board of directors of the Authors' Guild of America. He was the recipient of the 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction.

Chee was the associate fiction editor of literary magazine The Nervous Breakdown, and is currently a contributing editor at The New Republic, an editor-at-large at VQR and The Lit Hub, and a critic-at-large for Los Angeles Times.

He has taught fiction writing at The New School, Wesleyan, Iowa Writers' Workshop, Columbia University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Princeton University, In the winter semester 2012/2013 he was Picador Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig. Chee is currently full professor of creative nonfiction and fiction writing at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.