Marie Myung-Ok Lee

Marie Myung-Ok Lee is an acclaimed Korean-American writer and author of the novel The Evening Hero, a Good Morning America Book Club Buzz pick. Her journalism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Slate, Salon, and Guernica, among others. Marie teaches fiction at Columbia, where she is the writer in residence. Her recent novel, Hurt You, is a contemporary non-neurotypical retelling of Of Mice and Men, and her young adult novel, Finding My Voice, is considered the first contemporary set Asian American novel. 

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, and a Rhode Island State Council on the Arts fiction fellowship. 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.

In 2024 while at Mesa, Marie worked on American Dream: an Elegy, which tells the story of her father to highlight how an Asian body can be criminalized in the US solely for being Asian.