News & Events Novelist and Amherst College Visiting Writer Alexander Chee to Read from His Work at Amherst Books April 29

April 8, 2010                                                 

AMHERST, Mass.—Alexander Chee, the current visiting writer at Amherst College, will read from his work on Thursday, April 29, at 8 p.m. at Amherst Books (8 Main St.). The event, sponsored by the college’s Creative Writing Center, is free and open to the public and will be followed by refreshments.

Chee, whom Edmund White dubbed “The best new novelist I’ve seen in some time” and Annie Dillard has called “a brilliant new writer,” is the author of Edinburgh (Picador, 2002) and The Queen of the Night (forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). The Guardian called Edinburgh a “complex, sophisticated, elegant investigation of trauma and desire—like a white hot flame,” and Washington Post Book World described it as a “coming-of-age novel in the grand Romantic tradition, where passions run high, Cupid stalks Psyche, and love shares the dance floor with death … A lovely, nuanced, never predictable portrait of a creative soul in the throes of becoming.” The novel won the Michener Copernicus Prize, the AAWW Lit Award and the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize and was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year.

Chee was born in Rhode Island and raised in South Korea, Guam and Maine. He was a recipient of the 2003 Whiting Writers’ Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in Fiction and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Ledig House, The Hermitage and the VCCA. In addition, Out Magazine honored Chee as one of their 100 Most Influential People of 2003. He lives in Amherst and New York.

###