Karen An-hwei Lee

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of the poetry collections, The Beautiful Immunity (Tupelo 2024), Duress (Cascade 2022), Rose is a Verb: Neo-Georgics (W&S/Slant 2021), Phyla of Joy (Tupelo 2012), Ardor (Tupelo 2008), a July Open selection, and In Medias Res (Sarabande 2004), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize selected by Heather McHugh and the Norma Farber First Book Award chosen by Cole Swensen for the Poetry Society of America. She authored three novels, Sonata in K (Ellipsis 2017), The Maze of Transparencies (Ellipsis 2019), and Love Chronicles of the Octopodes (Ellipsis 2023). Her translations of Li Qingzhao's writings are collected in a single volume, Doubled Radiance: Poetry & Prose of Li Qingzhao (Singing Bone 2018). Lee also wrote two chapbooks, God’s One Hundred Promises, winner of the Swan Scythe Press Prize awarded by Sandra McPherson in 2002, and What the Sea Earns for a Living (Quaci Press 2014). A book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora (Cambria 2013), appears in the Cambria Sinophone World Series edited by Victor H. Mair, Chair of East Asian Languages & Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. Karen Lee has presented readings at the Japanese American National Museum, Holloway Poetry Series at U. C. Berkeley, the Program in Literary Arts at Brown University, the Lincoln Center in New York City, Seattle Town Hall, the Casa Romantica Reading Series in San Clemente, California, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the Orange Book Festival, Fall for the Book at George Mason University, and the Hugh C. Hyde Living Writers Series at San Diego State University. She has worked as a florist's assistant, mended books in a rare-book archive, grown cell cultures in a medical lab, read to children in a family literacy program, and taught music lessons as occupational therapy for mental health patients. A former writing resident at MacDowell Colony of the Arts and the Millay Arts Colony, she previously served as Full Professor of English and Chair at a liberal arts college in greater Los Angeles. She holds an M.F.A. from the Program in Literary Arts at Brown University and a Ph.D. in British & American Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. Lee has taught in the low-residency M.F.A. Program at Seattle Pacific University and served in the administration at Point Loma Nazarene University. Currently, she is the provost at Wheaton College in Illinois.