Susan Choi | |
|---|---|
 Choi at the 2019 Texas Book Festival | |
| Born | 1969 (age 55–56) South Bend, Indiana, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Education | Yale University (BA) Cornell University (MFA) |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Website | |
| susanchoi | |
Susan Choi (born 1969) is an American novelist. She is the author of several acclaimed novels, including The Foreign Student (1998), American Woman (2003), and Trust Exercise (2019), which won the National Book Award for Fiction.
Born in 1969 in South Bend, Indiana, to a Korean father and a Jewish mother, Choi attended public schools. When she was nine years old, her parents divorced. She and her mother moved to Houston, Texas, where she attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. [1] Choi earned a B.A. degree in Literature from Yale University (1990) and an M.F.A. from Cornell University. [2]
After receiving her graduate degree, she worked for The New Yorker as a fact checker. At this job she met her husband, Pete Wells; they separated in 2016 but continue to share a house in Brooklyn and co-parent their two sons. [3] [4] [2]
Choi published her first novel, The Foreign Student , in 1998. It won the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award.[ citation needed ] In 2000, she edited (with David Remnick) Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker, an anthology of short fiction.
Her second novel, American Woman (2003), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in literature. [5] In 2010, she won the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award for A Person of Interest , which was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2009. [6]
In 2014, her fourth novel, My Education , won the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction. [7]
As of May 2018, Choi was working on a novel employing conventions of memoir and reportage that "takes up the question of national identity, and the extent to which it coincides or does not coincide with ethnic and with cultural identity." [8] In 2019, she published her fifth novel, Trust Exercise , which won the National Book Award for Fiction. [9]
In 2025, Choi published her sixth novel, Flashlight. [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] It was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. [17]
Choi teaches creative writing at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. [18] Her work appeared in the New York Review of Books . [19]
| Title | Year | First published | Reprinted/collected | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flashlight | 2020 | Choi, Susan (September 7, 2020). "Flashlight". The New Yorker. Vol. 96, no. 26. pp. 60–66. | ||
| The Whale Mother | 2020 | Choi, Susan (January 2020). "The Whale Mother". Harper's Magazine. |
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