Carleton Convo with Marie Myung-Ok Lee | May 16, 2025

Author Marie Myung-Ok Lee delivered Carleton’s convocation address on Friday, May 16, from 10:50 to 11:50 a.m. in Skinner Chapel. Her address is titled, “Acceptance vs. Belonging and the Life You Want to Live.”

Lee’s novel Somebody’s Daughter (2005) was an O. Henry Award nominee and is celebrated as an important contribution to Korean American literature. She more recently published her second novel, The Evening Hero (2022), which The New York Times dubbed a “soulful, melodic, rhapsodic novel.” Beyond her writing for adults, Lee has written many beloved young adult (YA) novels under the name Marie G. Lee. Among these, her novel Finding My Voice (1992) is widely considered to be the first contemporary YA novel with an Asian American protagonist written by an Asian American.

Lee’s Korean identity has been thoroughly explored throughout her writing career. She was the first Fulbright Scholar to Korea for creative writing. She is also one of only fifty writers ever granted a visa to North Korea as a journalist since the Korean War. Lee’s journalism — mostly in the form of stories and essays — has been featured in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Guernica, and The Guardian, among others. Her work frequently engages with immigration, the effects of partition on Koreans and the Korean diaspora, and the hardship her mother endured to escape her war-torn homeland for a better life in the United States.

Lee earned her BA from Brown University, where she was a writer-in-residence before beginning her current teaching career at Columbia University. She has been a Yaddo and MacDowell Colony fellow, in addition to receiving the Best Book Award from the Friends of American Writers, a Rhode Island State Council on the Arts fiction fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fiction fellowship. Furthermore, she has served as a judge for the National Book Award and the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. She is also a founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

Learn more about Carleton Convos at go.carleton.edu/convocations