Susan Choi

Harman Writer-In-Residence, Fall 2006

Susan Choi is the author of two novels: The Foreign Student, which won the Asian-American Literary Award and the Steven Turner Award for first fiction in 1999; and American Woman, a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. In 2000 she was co-editor, along with New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick, of the anthology Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker.

Her nonfiction has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Tin House, The Believer, and Vogue. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is also a member of the Author’s Guild Council and has taught creative writing at Cornell, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Stern College, and Brooklyn College.

Currently at work on a third novel, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Pete Wells, and their son, Dexter. (July 2006)

“She never meant to become a familiar face anywhere, yet she’d find herself chatting with people. Introducing herself to the hardware-store owner, the train conductor, the librarian. Compensating, she knew, for her strangeness—not just her strangeness to this town, but her lone Asian face. Trying to out-flank suspicion. Sometimes she longed for a companion, to fulfill this desire for acceptance. A confidante, to make sure that she didn’t break down and confide in the plumber.”

— From American Woman

Biographical Update

Susan Choi is the author most recently of A Person of Interest (2008), a novel about an Asian American math professor falsely accused of using a mail bomb to murder.  Publishers Weekly called it “a haunting meditation on the myriad forms of alienation…. a magisterial meditation on appearance and misunderstanding.” A Person of Interest was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2009.

Ms. Choi is a lecturer in Creative Writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. (June 2009)