Lisa Ko worked on finishing her first novel, The Leavers, in residence in 2014. It became a national best-seller that won the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories and her essays and nonfiction in The New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City. While at MacDowell in 2021, she worked on her next novel.
Portrait by Art Streiber