Discover the Best Books Written by Alexander Chee

Alexander Chee is an American fiction writer, poet, journalist, and reviewer. 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. 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 essays in Out, From Boys To Men, Loss Within Loss, Boys Like Us, The M Word, and The Man I Might Become. 

In addition, 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, and 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/Looks, OutWeek, The Advocate, Out, Bookforum, and the San Francisco Review of Books. Chee's 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.

He was also the recipient of the 2003 Whiting Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship, a 2010 Massachusetts Cultural Council of the Arts Fellowship, and residency fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Civitella Ranieri, and Leidig House. In addition, he was a judge for the PEN/Open Book award in 2012 and currently serves on the board of directors of the Authors' Guild of America. Chee was the associate fiction editor of the 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 The Los Angeles Times.

He has taught fiction writing at the New School University, Wesleyan, University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Columbia University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Princeton University. In addition, he has served as a Visiting Writer at Amherst College. In the winter semester of 2012/2013, he was Picador's Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig. Chee is currently an associate professor of creative nonfiction and fiction writing at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.