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Margaret Juhae Lee

Biography

Margaret Juhae Lee

Margaret Juhae Lee is the author of STARRY FIELD: A Memoir of Lost History. She received a Bunting Fellowship from Harvard University and a Korean Studies Fellowship from the Korean Foundation in support of research for her book. Previously, she was an editor for the Books and the Arts section at The Nation magazine. Her articles, interviews and book reviews have been published in The Nation, Newsday, Elle, ARTnews, The Advocate, The Progressive and, most recently in The Rumpus and Ploughshares Blog. She was a contributing writer at Oakland Magazine, where she covered the local maker community. Her article “Seoul’s Celluloid Soul,” originally published in The Nation, was anthologized in Readings in Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture.

Margaret has an M.A. in Journalism from NYU’s Cultural Reporting & Criticism Program and an M.A. in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin. She has attended the Writer’s Hotel, Lit Camp and Tin House writing workshops and was awarded residencies at the Mesa Refuge, Anderson Center and Mineral School, where she received a fellowship from the Sustainable Arts Foundation for parents who are writers. 

In 2020, she was named “Person of the Year” by the Sangcheol Cultural Welfare Foundation in Kongju, South Korea, for her work in honoring her grandfather, Patriot Lee Chul Ha, with a gift from her family to his alma mater, Kongju High School.

A former college radio DJ, Margaret spends her free time listening to New Wave and indie rock while driving her extremely sporty children to soccer practices. She and her family survived the pandemic with the help of Brownie, a rescue dog from Korea.

Margaret Juhae Lee

Books by Margaret Juhae Lee

by Margaret Juhae Lee - Memoir, Nonfiction

As a young girl growing up in Houston, Margaret Juhae Lee never heard about her grandfather, Lee Chul Ha. His history was lost in early 20th-century Korea and guarded by Margaret’s grandmother, who Chul Ha left widowed in 1936 with two young sons. To his surviving family, Lee Chul Ha was a criminal, and his granddaughter was determined to figure out why. STARRY FIELD chronicles Chul Ha’s untold story. Combining investigative journalism, oral history and archival research, Margaret reveals the truth about the grandfather she never knew. But reclaiming his legacy, in the end, isn’t what Margaret finds the most valuable. It is through the series of three long-form interviews with her grandmother that Margaret finally finds a sense of recognition she’s been missing her entire life.