Quick Facts
Biography
Alexander Chee is an American fiction writer, poet, journalist and reviewer.
Born in Rhode Island, he spent his childhood in South Korea, Kauai, Truk, Guam and Maine. He attended Wesleyan University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Career
His short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Best American Erotica 2007, A Fictional History of the US (With Huge Chunks Missing), Men on Men 2000, and His 3. His essay "I, Reader" was selected for inclusion in the Notable Essays list of the 2011 edition of the Best American Essays. Compilations of his personal essays have appeared in From Boys To Men, Loss Within Loss, Boys Like Us, The M Word, and The Man I Might Become. His poetry appeared in Barrow Street, LIT, Interview, the James White Review, and XXX Fruit. He has written journalism and reviews for The New York Times, Time Out New York, Out/Look, OutWeek, The Advocate, Out, Bookforum and the San Francisco Review of Books.
He received the Asian American Writers Workshop Literary Award, the Lambda Editor's Choice Prize, the Michener/Copernicus Fellowship Prize, the 2003 Whiting Award, a residency from the MacDowell Colony and the 2004 NEA Fellowship in Fiction. He was a judge for the PEN/Open Book award in 2012. In 2003, Out named him one of their 100 Most Influential People of the year. The associate fiction editor of the online literary magazine The Nervous Breakdown, Chee now lives in Massachusetts.
He has taught fiction writing at the New School University and Wesleyan, and has served as a Visiting Writer at Amherst College.
In the winter semester 2012/2013 he was Picador Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig.
Works
Books
- 2001: Edinburgh, Picador USA, ISBN 978-0-31230-503-1
- 2016: The Queen of the Night. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2016. ISBN 978-0-618-66302-6.
Anthologies
- "Memorials". Literature of Tomorrow. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. 1990. ISBN 978-0-03032-903-6.
- Patrick Merla, ed. (1996). Boys Like Us: Gay Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories. Avon Books. ISBN 978-0-38097-340-8.
- His(3): Brilliant New Fiction by Gay Writers. Faber & Faber. 1999. ISBN 978-0-57119-963-1.
- "41, 42, 43". The "M" Word: Writers on Same-Sex Marriage. Algonquin Books. 2004. ISBN 978-1-56512-454-7.
- "Dick". From Boys to Men: Gay Men Write About Growing Up. Da Capo Press. 2006. ISBN 978-0-78671-632-6.
Essays and stories
- "Portrait of My Father". Granta. 12 March 2009.
- "Go Away". The Morning News. 13 August 2012.
- "Mr. and Mrs. B". Apology Magazine. 3. Winter 2014.
- "Girl". Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics. 16 March 2015.
Film appearances
- Interview in Sex Is... (1993), Directed by Marc Huestis, as himself