Discipline: Literature – nonfiction

Amy Yee

Discipline: Literature – nonfiction
Region: Brookline, MA
MacDowell Fellowships: 2019

Amy Yee is an award-winning journalist, writer, and poet. She writes for the New York Times, NPR, The Economist and others, and is a former staffer for the Financial Times in New York and India. Since 2016 she has worked in 11 countries across Africa, following seven years in India and six months in Bangladesh.

Amy had Notable Essays in the Best American Essays 2017, 2016 and 2015. She has won the United Nations Correspondents Association awards three times; South Asian Journalists Association awards four times; and the Association of Healthcare Journalists award for pieces about preventing deaths of children in Bangladesh and India.

At MacDowell, Amy worked on new chapters of two non-fiction books, one about Tibetan refugees in India, and the other about an innovative Iraqi-American community in Detroit. She also wrote new poems and refined the concept for a board game about American identity.

Amy is a published poet whose manuscript was a 2018 semi-finalist in the Crab Orchard Series contest. She has an M.F.A. from Hunter College in New York where she won the Academy of American Poets prize. She was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University, where she earned a master's degree, and has received grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, Solutions Journalism Network and the McGraw Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). Amy is a Boston native and proud to wear her Red Sox hat.

Studios

Star

Amy Yee worked in the Star studio.

Funded by Alpha Chi Omega, a national fraternity founded in 1885, Star Studio — built in 1911–1912 — was the first studio given to the residency by an outside organization. To this day, Alpha Chi sorority pledges learn the story of Star Studio and its role in supporting American arts and letters. Beginning as a nicely proportioned…

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