Alexander Chee

Alexander Chee – Life, Career, and Literary Legacy

Explore the life and works of Alexander Chee, an acclaimed American novelist, essayist, and teacher. Discover his journey through identity, writing, trauma, and the power of storytelling.

Introduction

Alexander Chee is a celebrated American writer known for his novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, as well as his powerful essays in How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. His work weaves together themes of identity, race, queerness, memory, and survival. As a teacher, editor, and public intellectual, he is deeply engaged in the conversations about who is allowed to tell stories—and how we reckon with our pasts to imagine futures.

Early Life and Background

Alexander Chee was born on August 21, 1967, in South Kingstown, Rhode Island.

In his early childhood and youth, Chee’s family moved frequently. He spent years in South Korea, Kauai, Truk, Guam, and Maine before settling in the continental U.S.

He attended Wesleyan University for his undergraduate degree and then went on to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for his MFA in fiction.

Literary Career & Major Works

Edinburgh (2001)

Chee’s debut novel, Edinburgh, is a coming-of-age narrative about a Korean American boy named Fee (Aphias Zhe) growing up in Maine, who must confront the trauma of sexual abuse by a choir director.

The book won critical acclaim and several honors:

• Michener/Copernicus Prize in fiction

• Asian American Writers’ Workshop Literary Award

• Lambda Literary’s or’s Choice Prize

• Named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly

Edinburgh is particularly notable for its raw depiction of trauma, the struggle to speak, and the search for identity.

The Queen of the Night (2016)

Chee’s second novel, The Queen of the Night, moves into a more expansive and imaginative space. It blends historical fiction, opera, fantasy, and melodrama. Lilliet Berne, a woman who adopts multiple identities and journeys across continents in pursuit of art, love, and self-creation.

The novel was a New York Times ors’ Choice and a national bestseller.

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)

This is Chee’s first major book of essays. The collection weaves personal memoir, literary reflections, and cultural critique.

Some of the essays had been published before (e.g. “Girl,” “Mr. and Mrs. B”), while others are newly composed or revised. The essays explore themes including:

• his experiences of sexual abuse and trauma

• identity as a queer, multiracial person

• the challenges and contradictions of the writing life

• politics, grief, the self, and belonging

This work was widely lauded, appearing on Time’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2018, and being a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir or Biography.

Essays, Journalism, and orial Work

Chee’s shorter work spans magazines, journals, and anthologies. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewanee Review, Slate, Guernica, and others. The New Republic, Los Angeles Times, Bookforum, and more.

He has served roles such as:

• Contributing editor at The New Republic

• or at large at Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR)

• Critic-at-large for Los Angeles Times

• Guest editor for The Best American Essays 2022

Academia, Teaching & Influence

Chee is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

Previously, he has taught at institutions including Wesleyan University, Columbia University, Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Princeton, and University of Texas at Austin.

Chee also holds multiple fellowships and honors:

• Whiting Award (2003)

• NEA Fellowship

• Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship (MCCA)

• 2021 United States Artists Fellow

• 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction

He has also received residencies from the MacDowell Colony, VCCA, Civitella Ranieri, Leidig House, and Amtrak’s residency program.

Themes, Style & Identity

Intersecting Identities

Chee writes from the intersections of being Korean American, multiracial, queer, and a survivor of trauma. His essays often explore what it means to belong—or not belong—in the spaces of race, sexuality, and literature.

The Autobiographical & the Fictive

Even though Edinburgh is fiction, it carries strong autobiographical echoes. In essays such as “On Becoming an American Writer”, Chee reflects on how fiction and memory collide, and how writing can serve as a way to process traumatic experience.

Trauma, Silence & Power

Chee does not shy away from difficult subjects—sexual abuse, grief, mortality—but he often examines how silence is enforced, how voices are stolen or suppressed. His work presses on how one claims language and space after violation.

Lyrical, Ambitious Style

His writing often blends poetic imagery, expansive structure, and emotional resonance. The Queen of the Night especially shows his capacity for genre-blending and scale.

Notable Quotes & Excerpts

Here are a few resonant lines and ideas from Chee’s writings:

• In How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, he writes:

  “In these essays … I reckon with my identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend.”

• On memory and fiction (from On Becoming an American Writer):

  “Speak to your dead. Write for your dead. … When war comes … be sure you write for the living too.”

• On the challenge of writing from a marginalized position:

  Many of the stories Chee sees in workshop are stories about white people or characters with no declared ethnicity, showing how normative assumptions shape what stories get told.

• On the tension between trauma and creation:

  In Edinburgh, “the damage inflicted by a child molester … how they cope with this trauma” becomes a way to explore how voices are silenced and reclaimed.

Legacy & Influence

Alexander Chee is a vital voice in contemporary American literature, especially in circles concerned with queer and Asian American representation. Some aspects of his impact include:

• Expanding narrative possibilities: He challenges conventions about what stories queer, multiracial, or marginalized writers can tell.

• Bridging genres: His seamless movement between fiction, essays, criticism, and teaching creates a model of the modern writer as a cultural interlocutor.

• Mentorship & pedagogy: Through his teaching and editorial work, he helps nurture newer voices and presses conversations about canon, inclusion, and craft.

• Honest reckoning with trauma: His willingness to examine the wounds of abuse—while not reducing identity to suffering—gives space to readers and writers alike.

• Articulation of belonging and exile: His own life and writing express what it means to be between places, races, and ways of being—and how that in-betweenness can be generative.

Conclusion

Alexander Chee’s life and work demonstrate how literature can be a space for confession, conversation, and reinvention. His stories and essays ask how we live in the shadows of memory and desire—and how we create selves by telling, retelling, and reworking the stories we carry.