Baker Artist Portfolios

Don Lee received a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction in 2023. His latest book is the story collection The Partition, which was published by Akashic Books and longlisted for The Story Prize. He is also the author of the novel Lonesome Lies Before Us; the novel The Collective, which won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature; the novel Wrack and Ruin, which was a finalist for the Thurber Prize; the novel Country of Origin, which won an American Book Award and the Edgar Award for Best First Novel; and the story collection Yellow, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. The latter five books were published by W.W. Norton.

He has received an O. Henry Award and a Pushcart Prize, and his stories have been published in One Story, The Sewanee Review, VQR, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Massachusetts Cultural Council and residencies from Yaddo and the Lannan Foundation.

From 2009 to 2024, he taught in the MFA program at Temple University. 

He is a third-generation Korean American. The son of a career State Department officer, he spent the majority of his childhood in Tokyo and Seoul. He received his BA in English literature from UCLA and his MFA in creative writing and literature from Emerson College.

He lives in Baltimore with his wife, the writer Jane Delury.