Background

Ethnicity: Alexander Chee's father was from Korea, while his mother was from the United States.

Alexander Chee was born on September 21, 1967, in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, United States. He is a son of Jane, a schoolteacher, and Choung Tai Chee, engineer and oceanographer. The first three years he lived in Korea, in his grandfather's house in Seoul, before moving to Truk, Hawaii, Guam, then Maine. His father's family in Korea keeps traditions they brought with them from China in the 15th Century that the Chinese no longer keep; they use an archaic Chinese script in the keeping of the family's records. When Alexander Chee was a child, he became an inveterate bookworm: he read constantly, whether it was science fiction novels like Frank Herbert's Dune, or Cheever's The Wapshot Chronicle. As a kid, he wanted to be a fashion designer.

Education

Alexander Chee took a test for possible occupations in high school and that suggested to become an actor. He liked acting, but he was also good at music and drawing and he didn't think to become a writer. Taking writing classes at Wesleyan College, however, changed Chee's mind and prompted him to think of writing as a professional career. Alexander Chee studied at Wesleyan University from 1985 to 1989. He honed his writing skills under the tutelage of Anne Dillard. From 1992 to 1994, he attended the Iowa University Writers' Workshop and received a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.

Career

Alexander Chee made New York City his home while serving as assistant editor of Out Magazine. He has taught at New School University, Goddard College, and Wesleyan University. He has served as an instructor at Amherst College.

Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh, The Queen of the Night, the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, The Weddings. His debut novel, Edinburgh, addresses the painful subject of child abuse. The novel is inspired by a Korean folktale of the fox-woman, Lay Tammamo, who transforms from a fox into a woman after falling in love with a woman. Chee's shorter works, which include essays, short stories, and autobiographical sketches, have been published in a variety of mediums since 1990 - works such as These Trees Were Once Women in Boys Like Us: Gay Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories (1996), A Pilgrimage of You in His 3: Brilliant New Fiction by Gay Writers (1999), Self Quiz in The Man I Might Become: Gay Men Write about Their Fathers (2002), and Best Fraudster Date Ever in Blithe Howse Quarterly (2005). These stories explore the themes of desire, trauma, and queer identity.

Alexander Chee works as an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is also a contributing editor at The New Republic, an editor at The Virginia Quarterly Review, and a critic at The Los Angeles Times.

Achievements

• Alexander Chee is a recipient of the NEA Fellowship in Fiction and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Ledig House, Amtrak and Civitella Ranieri. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Tin House, Slate, and NPR. Alexander Chee's debut novel, Edinburgh, for which he won a Whiting Award, was critically acclaimed and praised for its careful handling on the difficult subject of sexual abuse. It was the winner of the James Michener/Copernicus Society Fellowship Prize, Iowa Writers' Workshop's Michener Copernicus Prize in Fiction, and was the recipient of the Lambda Literary Foundation Editor's Choice Award.
  
  His second novel, Queen of the Night, a historical novel about a female opera singer, was published nearly fifteen years later in 2016 and was met with high praise, being named "epic" by Vogue and "brilliant" by The Washington Post. His first collection of essays, How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, was named a Best Book of 2018 by New York Magazine, TIME, NPR, The Washington Post, and many others. In 2003, Out Magazine named him one of their 100 most influential people of the year.

Works

More photos

• book

  • How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

    (How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author's ma...)

    2018
  • The Queen of the Night

    (The Queen of the Night tells the mesmerizing story of Lil...)

    2016
  • Edinburgh

    (Twelve-year-old Fee is a shy Korean American boy and a ne...)

    2001
  • The Weddings

    (For Jack Cho, a fortysomething gay man, being able to mar...)

    2019

Views

Alexander Chee has long been an outspoken advocate for Asian American writers and for LGBTQ rights, from his work with the AIDS advocacy groups ACT UP and Queer Nation in San Francisco in the 1980s and '90s to calling out racism and homophobia he experienced as an MFA student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. The latter experience, he says, led him to run for - and win - the title of prom queen of the 1994 Iowa Writers' Workshop prom.

Membership

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  Alexander Chee serves on the board of directors of the Authors' Guild of America.

  Authors' Guild of America , United States

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  AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power , United States

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  Queer Nation , United States

Interests

• Writers

  Joan Didion, Anne Carson, Jeanette Winterson, Maxine Hong Kingston, David Leavitt, Andre Lorde, June Jordan, Ursula K. Le Guin

Connections

The day in 2011 that Alexander Chee went to the office of the city clerk in lower Manhattan with his partner Dustin Schell to register for their domestic partnership was coincidentally also the first day same-sex partners were allowed to register for marriage in the state of New York.

Father:

Choung Tai Chee

Choung Tai Chee was born in Korea and he left for the United States with his oldest brother. He went to the University of Brownsville and transferred after a year to Pomona College, for engineering. Choung Tai Chee taught tae kwon do in Los Angeles and had celebrity students, including Peter Fonda.

life partner:

Dustin Schell

tutor:

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard has been considered a major voice in American literature since she published Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in 1974 and won a Pulitzer Prize. Dillard has written a novel, some essays, poetry, and a memoir; her most characteristic books, however, are imaginative non-fiction narratives - witnessings or accounts, stories, and speculations. Her distinctive, and distinctively American, prose style has been widely recognized and openly imitated.

Alexander Chee honed his writing skills under the tutelage of Anne Dillard.

References

• Alexander Chee