Alexander Chee is an Korean-American fiction writer, poet, journalist and reviewer. He attended Wesleyan University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Of his time at Wesleyan University he says
Well, I went to college at Wesleyan so I knew about liberal islands. I moved out there in 1989, with some friends. We all wanted to be a part of ACT UP and Queer Nation. We had been going to ACT UP protests in New York and using ACT UP strategies to protest on campus. I was learning the power of the slogan basically. It’s no surprise to me that a lot of people I know from ACT UP went on to be very successful at graphic design, PR, advertising.
Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh, The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel
He is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and an editor at large at VQR. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, T Magazine, Tin House, Slate, Guernica, and Out, among others. He reflected on the beginnings of his writing career in the freelance world this way
I published my first short story as I left college. And I got an internship at this magazine called OUT/LOOK, a queer journal at the time, and I wrote my first cover story for them as an intern on Queer Nation. The person they had writing the story just never filed, and my editor was like, “So you go to Queer Nation meetings, right?” And I was like, “Yeah.” So I wrote it, and to my great pleasure, it’s cited in a lot of queer history textbooks. At the time, I also fell in love with this man in New York and we started sending each other letters that were 20, 30, 40 pages long sometimes. They were zines of themselves basically, but also even like novellas at times. The picture on the cover of the book is from a group of photos that I took to make those letters for that man. That’s who I’m looking at in the picture or who I imagine I’m looking at in the picture.
He is winner of a 2003 Whiting Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in prose and a 2010 MCCA Fellowship, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak. In addition he i an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.
Unfortunately for you literary Queers, Alexander Chee is taken. His his husband, Dustin Schell, a screenwriter and filmmaker.
Watch an interview with Alexander Chee below
To learn more about Alexander visit some of his social media sites
Website – Alexander Chee
Facebook – Alexander Chee
Twitter – @alexanderchee
Instagram cheemobile
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