Susan Choi

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. Choi teaches creative writing at Yale University.

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
www.susanchoi.com

Early life and education

Choi was born in South Bend, Indiana to a Korean father and a Jewish mother. She 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. in Literature from Yale University (1990) and an M.F.A. from Cornell University.^[2]

Career

Choi at the 2019 National Book Festival

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 (1998). It won the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction and was a finalist of the Discover Great New Writers Award at Barnes & Noble. 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]

With David Remnick, Choi edited an anthology of short fiction entitled Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker. Her latest novel is Trust Exercise (2019), which won the National Book Award for Fiction.

As of May 2018, Choi is 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]

She teaches creative writing at Yale University.^[9]

Awards and grants

• Asian American Literary Award for Fiction for The Foreign Student
• Steven Turner Award for The Foreign Student
• National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient (2001)
• Guggenheim Fellow (2004).
• PEN/W.G. Sebald Award (2010) for A Person of Interest
• Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction for My Education (2014)^[10]
• National Book Award for Fiction for Trust Exercise (2019)^[11]
• Sunday Times Short Story Award (2021) for Flashlight^[12]

Bibliography

Novels

• The Foreign Student (1998), ISBN 0-06-019149-X
• American Woman (2003), ISBN 0-06-054221-7
• A Person of Interest (2008), ISBN 978-0-670-01846-8
• My Education (2013), ISBN 0670024902
• Trust Exercise (novel) (2019), ISBN 9781250222022

Children's books

• Camp Tiger (picture book, illustrated by John Rocco) (2019), ISBN 9780399173295

Short fiction

Anthologies (edited)

• Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker (2000), ISBN 0-375-50356-0 (ed. with David Remnick)

Stories^[13]

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.

See also

• Korean Americans in New York City
• Literary license