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Marie Myung-Ok Lee

Biography

Marie Myung-Ok Lee

Marie Myung-Ok Lee is an acclaimed Korean American writer. She is the author of the novels THE EVENING HERO and FINDING MY VOICE, the latter of which is thought to be one of the first contemporary-set Asian American YA novels. She is one of a handful of American journalists who have been granted a visa to North Korea since the Korean War.

She was 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.

Marie is a founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and teaches creative writing at Columbia. She lives in New York City with her family.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee

Books by Marie Myung-Ok Lee

by Marie Myung-Ok Lee - Fiction

Dr. Yungman Kwak is in the twilight of his life. Every day for the last 50 years, he has headed to Horse Breath’s General Hospital, where he treats the women and babies of the small rural Minnesota town he chose to call home. He immigrated from Korea after the Korean War, forced to leave his family, ancestors, village and all that he knew behind. But his life is built on a lie. And one day, a letter arrives that threatens to expose it. His life is thrown into chaos --- the hospital abruptly closes, his wife refuses to spend time with him, and his son is busy investing in a struggling health start-up. Yungman faces a choice --- he must choose to hide his secret from his family and friends, or confess and potentially lose all he’s built.