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 in 2022 and longlisted for The Story Prize. He is also the author of novel Lonesome Lies Before Us (2017); the novel The Collective (2012), which won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature from the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association; the novel Wrack and Ruin (2008), which was a finalist for the Thurber Prize; the novel Country of Origin (2004), which won an American Book Award, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and a Mixed Media Watch Image Award for Outstanding Fiction; and the story collection Yellow (2001), which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Members Choice Award from the Asian American Writers' Workshop. 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, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, GQ, The Gettysburg Review, Manoa, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. His book reviews and essays have appeared in LitHub, Electric Literature, The Stranger, The Boston Globe, Harvard Review, Boston magazine, The Village Voice, and other magazines. He has received fellowships from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Massachusetts Cultural Council and residencies from Yaddo and the Lannan Foundation.

For many years, he was the principal editor of the literary journal Ploughshares. Since 2009, he has been teaching in the MFA program at Temple University and is currently the program director. In 2019, he was a fiction faculty member at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

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. In Tokyo, he attended ASIJ—the American School in Japan. 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.