Alexander Chee
Alexander Chee was born on August 21, 1967, in Rhode Island, a state whose New England setting places him within the literary culture of the American Northeast. A citizen of the United States, he has worked across several overlapping roles — as a writer, journalist, poet, literary critic, and scholar of English — each pursuit shaped by formal study at Wesleyan University and later at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
His novel Edinburgh is among his notable works, a piece of fiction that sits within a body of writing produced across multiple modes and registers. That work has been accompanied by recognition in the form of concrete honors: a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Open Book Award, and an Asian American Literary Award. These distinctions reflect the range of his engagements with fiction, criticism, and public letters, and mark his standing within American literary life.
Alongside his writing, Chee has served as a university teacher and docent, carrying his engagement with English into instructional settings. His career has moved through these parallel tracks rather than narrowing to a single form. The record of his work — from his Rhode Island origins through his training at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, his novel, and his accumulation of literary awards — traces a sustained presence across American letters, anchored most concretely in the Guggenheim Fellowship and the other honors he has received.
Quotes by Alexander Chee
Alexander Chee's insights on:
My singing voice had rescued me from the scene I was in at school - I was an unpopular, bookish kid who had an indeterminate ethnic background. I became fascinated with women sopranos because they had a future that I didn't as a singer.
My first letter of acceptance, to UMass - Amherst, came with an offer of a fellowship and a note from John Edgar Wideman.
Acadia was founded in 1916 by Woodrow Wilson as the first Eastern national park, aided by rich men, often with middle initials, the 'rusticators,' as they were known then, the first of our wealthy out-of-state visitors.
I knew I wanted the parties in 'The Queen of the Night' to be convincing, beautiful, and also dramatic: situations where significant things happened on a scale that was both grand and intimate. There were several texts that helped me think about how to do this, and one of the most important ones was Charlotte Bronte's novel 'Villette.'
The qualities that make parties such a nightmare for people - and also so pleasurable - make them incredibly important inside of fiction. There's a chaos agent quality to them: You just don't know who's going to be there or why. You could run into an old enemy, an old friend, an old friend who's become an enemy.
I met my first boyfriend when we were 13, playing 'Dungeons and Dragons' in the basement of my local comics shop. We were from the same small town in Maine but went to different schools.
The Narrator of 'A Sport and a Pastime' is an American photographer living in a borrowed house in what he calls 'the real France,' Autun, a small town where he hopes to take some career-changing photographs in the spirit of Atget.
I had first come to Berlin in 1990, on a search for someplace to live besides the United States.
I've known the poet Eileen Myles since the 1990s, when I first moved to New York, and I remember seeing her walking her Pit Bull Rosie around the East Village. She had these beautiful arms and David Cassidy hair and the sort of swagger so many of the gay boys I knew wished we had. We all had crushes on her.
My mother's family has been in Maine for over 300 years on the same farm. They have a King George III deed.