Marie Myung-Ok Lee

Marie Myung-Ok Lee is a founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and teaches creative writing at Columbia, where she is Writer in Residence. She was a winner of the War & Peace faculty initiative grant for The Evening Hero and has written about the Korean War for Gen Magazine, Salon, and most recently for Ibram X. Kendi's journal, The Emancipator. One of a handful of American journalists who have been granted a visa to North Korea since the Korean War, Lee was also the first Fulbright Scholar to Korea in creative writing and has received many honors for her work, including an O. Henry honorable mention, the Best Book Award from the Friends of American Writers, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fiction fellowship. Her stories and essays have been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Guernica, The Paris Review, The Nation, and The Guardian, among others. She has appeared on CNN's The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer talking about diplomacy in North Korea and on Dr. Sanjay Gupta's program Weed, discussing being the first parent to use cannabis for her son with autism. She is a staff writer for The Millions and a board member of the National Book Critics Circle.