Susan Choi Biography

American novelist (born 1969)

Susan Choi (born 1969) is an American novelist.

Early life and education

Choi was born in South Bend, Indiana to a Korean father and a Jewish mother. She attended public schools. When she was nine years old, her parents divorced. She and her mother moved to Houston, Texas. Choi earned a B.A. in Literature from Yale University (1990) and an M.F.A. from Cornell University.

Career

Choi at the 2019 National Book Festival

After receiving her graduate degree, she worked for The New Yorker as a fact checker. At this job she met her husband, Pete Wells, now the New York Times restaurant critic. They reside in Brooklyn.

Choi published her first novel, The Foreign Student (1998). It won the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction and was a finalist of the Discover Great New Writers Award at Barnes & Noble. Her second novel, American Woman (2003), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in literature. In 2010, she won the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award for A Person of Interest, which was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2009. In 2014, her fourth novel, My Education, won the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction.

With David Remnick, Choi edited an anthology of short fiction en*led Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker. Her latest novel is Trust Exercise (2019), which won the National Book Award for Fiction.

As of May 2018, Choi is working on a novel employing conventions of memoir and reportage that "takes up the question of national iden*y, and the extent to which it coincides or does not coincide with ethnic and with cultural iden*y."

She teaches creative writing at Yale University.

Awards and grants

• Asian American Literary Award for Fiction for The Foreign Student
• Steven Turner Award for The Foreign Student
• National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient (2001)
• Guggenheim Fellow (2004).
• PEN/W.G. Sebald Award (2010) for A Person of Interest
• Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction for My Education (2014)
• National Book Award for Fiction for Trust Exercise (2019)
• Sunday Times Short Story Award (2021) for Flashlight

Bibliography

Novels

• The Foreign Student (1998), ISBN:0-06-019149-X
• American Woman (2003), ISBN:0-06-054221-7
• A Person of Interest (2008), ISBN:978-0-670-01846-8
• My Education (2013), ISBN:0670024902
• Trust Exercise (novel) (2019), ISBN:9781250222022

Children's books

• Camp Tiger (picture book, illustrated by John Rocco) (2019), ISBN:9780399173295

Short fiction

Anthologies (edited)

• Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker (2000), ISBN:0-375-50356-0 (ed. with David Remnick)

Stories

See also

• Korean Americans in New York City
• Literary license

References

Further reading

• Nelson, Emmanuel Sampath (2000-01-01). Asian American novelists a bio-bibliographical critical sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.
• "Susan Choi". Contemporary Authors Online. Gale. 2014. Retrieved 25 March 2017.
• State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, "Indiana" essay.

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Susan Choi.Wikimedia Commons has media related to Susan Choi.

• Official website
• Excerpt from Susan Choi's fiction in Guernica (guernicamag.com)
• Goldsea.com - interview with Susan Choi (2003)
• New York Public Library Young Lions Award finalist 2004
• link to picture of Susan Choi