Don Lee (author)

Don Lee (born 1959) is a Korean-American novelist who spent his childhood in Tokyo and Seoul as the son of a State Department officer. He received his B.A. in English Literature from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Emerson College. He has also served as the primary editor of the literary journal Ploughshares for 17 years. Lee's earlier work have appeared in GQ, New England Review, American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review, and Glimmer Train, with Voir Dire anthologized in Charlie Chan is Dead 2. He has also received fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the St. Botolph Club Foundation.

His first collection of short stories, Yellow, documents the lives of various Asian American characters living in the fictional Rosarita Bay. Yellow won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He followed that collection with the novel Country of Origin, which earned an American Book Award and an Edgar Award for Best First Novel.

In 2008, Lee finished a new novel called Wrack and Ruin. The book, which revisits the fictional town of Rosarita Bay, was published by W.W. Norton in April 2008. Lee was formerly a faculty member of the Creative Writing department at Macalester College. In the fall of 2008, Lee moved to the faculty of Western Michigan University where he taught both graduate and undergraduate courses. He is currently in the faculty of the Creative Writing program at Temple University.

In 2012, Norton published Lee's third novel, The Collective.