Alexander Chee, our 2025 Frank B. Hanes Writer-in-Residence, will visit campus the week of March 17. He will give a reading on Tuesday, March 18 in Moeser Auditorium that is free and open to the public.
In his essay “On Becoming an American Writer,” Alexander Chee observes, “To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth, but into it…. When the writing works best, I feel like I could poke one of these words out of place and find the writer’s eye there, looking through to me.” Indeed, within Chee’s writing lives an exacting gaze that pierces our world, inviting us to see and reimagine alongside our author with attentive honesty and dignity.
Across his works of fiction and nonfiction, Chee builds prose that is deftly inquisitive, intimate, vibrant in scope and imagination. One of the most compelling literary voices of our time, Chee, who engages with questions of selfhood, history, identity, mythology, and memory in his writing, also pinpoints that warm, living muscle—that unyielding heart—in all of us. Chee’s work pulses with lyric energy, with life.
Alexander Chee is the author of three books, including most recently the widely acclaimed essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2018. In this collection, Chee paints vivid, complex portraits of a continuously-evolving self, including narratives of tending to a backyard Brooklyn rose garden; negotiating his queer and Asian American identities; studying—and teaching—the art of writing amidst political precarity; among many other meditations on the self and society. While these essays range in time and scope, Chee’s nonfiction remains textured with an honest self-recognition that glints across each page. As The New York Times writes, “these pieces are personal, never pedagogical. They bespeak an unguarded sincerity and curiosity.” Truly, Chee’s essays show us—as writers and as humans—how to look more closely at the world; to give our own lives, in all their complexities, more space inside it; and ultimately, to believe in the power and importance of telling our stories.
In addition to his nonfiction work, Chee is the author of two novels, Edinburgh (Welcome Rain, 2001; Picador, 2002) and The Queen of the Night (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). In Edinburgh, Chee’s debut novel, a Korean American protagonist negotiates the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse in small-town Maine, weaving together nuanced threads of desire, shame, and survival. For Edinburgh, Chee won the Iowa Writers’ Workshop’s Michener Copernicus Prize in Fiction, the Lambda Literary Foundation Editor’s Choice Prize, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Literary Award.
In 2016, Chee published The Queen of the Night, a historical epic, set in 19th century France, that unravels an opera singer’s secretive past. The Queen of the Night, which novelist Hanya Yanagihara calls “a luminous universe in which its lucky readers can dissolve completely,” was further celebrated as a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, and others. Chee’s forthcoming novel, Other People’s Husbands, is forthcoming from Mariner Books in 2025.
The son of a Korean father and American mother, Chee was born in South Kingston, Rhode Island, and raised in South Korea, Guam, Truk, and Maine. As an undergraduate student, Chee studied with the writers Annie Dillard and Kit Reed at Wesleyan University, and he holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
For his writing, Chee has received many distinguished awards, including a 2021 United States Artist Fellowship, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in Prose, a 2003 Whiting Award, as well as artist residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Civitella Ranieri, among others. Chee serves as a contributing editor at The New Republic, an editor at large at The Virginia Quarterly Review, and a critic at large at The Los Angeles Times. He was guest-editor for Best American Essays 2022, and his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Granta, The Paris Review, The Sewanee Review, N+1, Guernica, and Best American Essays 2016 and 2019. Chee teaches at Dartmouth College, where he is a professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing.
Whereas Chee pays homage to his creative lineage—often honoring his writing teachers, such as Dillard, who have come before him—he also illuminates a path forward for generations of future writers. As poet-novelist Ocean Vuong wrote of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, “These essays are more than maps; for me, as a younger writer, they are the very ground, the earth made solid enough so that I might stand here, made rich enough so that I might plant here, and thrive here. This book makes me feel possible.”
How lucky we are to revel in the possibilities of Alexander Chee’s writing together! Please join us in welcoming Chee in the coming month!