Alexander Chee
Professor of English and Creative Writing
Alexander Chee is a novelist and essayist and teaches fiction writing and the essay. He is the author of the novels Edinburgh (Welcome Rain, 2001; Picador, 2002) and The Queen of the Night (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). His first collection of essays, How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2018. His essay "Girl," will appear this fall in Best American Essays 2016, edited by Jonathan Franzen. He is a contributing editor at The New Republic, an editor at large at The Virginia Quarterly Review, and a critic at large at The Los Angeles Times. His debut novel, Edinburgh, won the Iowa Writers' Workshop's Michener Copernicus Prize in Fiction, the Lambda Literary Foundation's Editor's Choice Prize, and the Asian American Writers' Workshop Literary Award. He is recipient of a 2003 Whiting Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in prose and a 2010 Massachusetts Cultural Council of the Arts Fellowship, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Civitella Ranieri, and Leidig House. He serves on the board of directors of the Authors' Guild of America.
Contact
Department(s)
English and Creative Writing
Education
- M.F.A. University of Iowa
- B.A. Wesleyan University
Selected Publications
Novels:
The Queen of the Night, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, hardcover publication, February 2, 2016; softcover publication, November 2, 2016.
Edinburgh, Welcome Rain, hardcover publication November 2, 2001; Picador, softcover publication, November 9, 2002; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, softcover publication, November 2, 2016.
Recent Essays and Criticism:
"Girl," Best American Essays 2016, Oct 4th, 2016.
"Rich Children," Freeman's, Volume 2, August 2016.
"How I Became A North Korean, by Krys Lee," The New York Times Book Review, Aug 31, 2016.
"The Narrow Door, by Paul Lisicky," The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Feb. 12, 2016.
"Children of the Century," The New Republic, Feb. 2, 2016.
"Heartbreak Hotel: Rick Moody's Hotels of North America," The New Republic, Nov 10, 2015.
"The Race to Build Elon Musk's Hyperloop Heats Up," WSJ: The Future of Everything, Nov. 30, 2015.
"Gender Genre," The New York Times Book Review, Oct 10th, 2014.