Faculty Snapshot: Marie Myung-Ok Lee

Tell us about your work.
I teach the Advanced Fiction Workshop in the undergraduate writing program. I am also in the final stages of preparing my novel, The Evening Hero, for publication by Simon & Schuster in 2022. I direct the Asian American Diasporic Writers series at The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER).

What are you looking forward to right now? What are you most excited about?
I give my attention to my students' work during the semester, so I am looking forward to starting work again on The Evening Hero. The novel is about rural hospital closures, anti-Asian racism, and how war trauma seeps into everyday life for an immigrant—themes that have become suddenly more urgent and topical.

Tell us about a book that you have read recently and would recommend.
The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War- a deeply researched and elegantly written book that takes apart the simplistic and paranoid narrative of brainwashing of POWs by North Korea and looks at how the US among others used interrogation rooms for its own ideological ends during the Armistice and repatriation of prisoners.

To learn more about Professor Lee's research, please visit her faculty websitefollow her on Twitter, or email her directly.