Marie Myung-Ok Lee is an acclaimed Korean-American writer and author of the novel The Evening Hero, which looks at the future of medicine, immigration, North Korea. She graduated from Brown University and was a Writer in Residence there, before she began teaching at Columbia University’s Writing Division. She is one of the few journalists who have been allowed to travel to North Korea since the Korean War.

Her stories and essays have been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Guernica, The Emancipator, and The Guardian, among others. She was the first Fulbright Scholar to Korea in creative writing and has received many honors for her work, including an O. Henry honorable mention, the Best Book Award from the Friends of American Writers, and New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellowship. She is a founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.