Marie Myung-Ok Lee is the author of Hurt You and The Evening Hero, a Good Morning America Book Club Buzz pick. Her essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Paris Review, and The Guardian, among others. She was an inaugural recipient of a Robert B. Silvers foundation grant supporting "writers working in the fields of long-form literary and arts criticism, the intellectual essay, political analysis, and social reportage."
Lee is a founder and former board president of the Asian American Writers' Workshop and teaches at Columbia. She is also one of the few journalists who has been granted a visa to visit North Korea, which she did in 2004. It is the setting for The Evening Hero.
While at MacDowell in 2004, Lee continued work on The United States of Austin: A Literary Memoir, Medical Mystery, and public Health Warning and the anthology Toddler. During her 2025 residency, she worked on her first book-length nonfiction project, a memoir about her father tentatively titled, American Dream: An Elegy. "Bull Cookie, or Grilling Season" a chapter that she worked on while in residence will appear in Prairie Schooner in 2026.
