ABOUT

Chin-Sun Lee is the author of Upcountry, her debut novel from Unnamed Press, listed among Publishers Weekly’s Big Indie Books of Fall 2023, and is one of Poets & Writers’ 5 Over 50 for 2023. She’s also a contributor to the New York Times bestselling anthology Women in Clothes (Blue Rider Press/Penguin 2014), edited by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton.

She is the youngest child of North Korean exiles, both her parents having fled their native provinces for Seoul at the outset of the Korean War. Years later, her father worked for the South Korean government as a foreign consulate, often sent to different corners of the world. When she was five, he was assigned to Los Angeles, where her family settled and eventually became U.S. citizens. 

It took her several years to realize her ambition as a writer. After a long career in fashion design, she earned an MFA in Creative Writing at The New School in New York, and in 2014, left fashion to commit herself fully to her writing. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Literary Hub, The Georgia Review, The Rumpus, Joyland, and The Believer Logger, among other publications.

She is grateful for writing fellowships from The Hambidge Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, and the Playa Artist Residency. She also participated in the Blood Jet and Lady Fest Reading Series in New Orleans, the Franklin Park, Earshot, and Renegade Reading Series in Brooklyn, and the inaugural Riverviews Artspace event in Lynchburg. Currently, she lives in New Orleans, at work on her second novel.