Alexander Chee

Alexander Chee
Chee at the 2018 Texas Book Festival
Born	(1967-08-21) August 21, 1967 (age 56) South Kingston, Rhode Island, United States
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	American
Notable works	Edinburgh, The Queen of the Night

Alexander Chee (born August 21, 1967) is an American fiction writer, poet, journalist and reviewer.^[1]

Born in Rhode Island, he spent his childhood in South Korea, Kauai, Truk, Guam and Maine.^[2] 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,^[3][4] and his essay "Girl," was included in Best American Essays 2016.^[5]

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.^[6] He has written journalism and reviews for The New York Times,^[7] Time Out New York, Out/Look, 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.^[8]

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.^[5] He was a judge for the PEN/Open Book award in 2012^[9] and currently serves on the board of directors of the Authors' Guild of America.

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 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,^[6] and has served as a Visiting Writer at Amherst College.^[10] In the winter semester 2012/2013 he was Picador Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig.^[11] Chee is currently associate professor of creative nonfiction and fiction writing at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.^[5]

Works

Books

• 2001: Edinburgh, Picador USA, ISBN 978-0-31230-503-1
• 2016: The Queen of the Night. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2016. ISBN 978-0-618-66302-6.
• 2018: How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (April 17, 2018), Mariner Books, ISBN 978-1328764522

Anthologies

• "Memorials". Literature of Tomorrow. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. 1990. ISBN 978-0-03032-903-6.
• Patrick Merla, ed. (1996). Boys Like Us: Gay Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories. Avon Books. ISBN 978-0-38097-340-8.
• His(3): Brilliant New Fiction by Gay Writers. Faber & Faber. 1999. ISBN 978-0-57119-963-1.
• "41, 42, 43". The "M" Word: Writers on Same-Sex Marriage. Algonquin Books. 2004. ISBN 978-1-56512-454-7.
• "Dick". From Boys to Men: Gay Men Write About Growing Up. Da Capo Press. 2006. ISBN 978-0-78671-632-6.

Essays and stories

• "Portrait of My Father". Granta. 12 March 2009.
• "Go Away". The Morning News. 13 August 2012.
• "Mr. and Mrs. B". Apology Magazine. 3. Winter 2014.
• "Girl". Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics. 16 March 2015.
• "What My Korean Father Taught Me About Defending Myself in America". GQ. 14 May 2021.

Film appearances

• Interview in Sex Is... (1993), Directed by Marc Huestis, as himself

Podcast appearances

• LGBTQ&A, "Alexander Chee: On Becoming An American Writer," April 23, 2018^[12]

References

Further reading

• Acocella, Joan (February 22, 2016). "Night music : a novel of nineteenth-century Paris". The Critics. Books. The New Yorker. Vol. 92, no. 2. pp. 74–76.^[a]

———————

Notes

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Alexander Chee.