March 12, 2008 — Award-winning writer Don Lee will read from his work on Thursday, March 20 at the U.Va. Bookstore at 8 p.m. His visit, free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Creative Writing Program in the University of Virginia's English department.

Until last year the editor of the literary journal Ploughshares, Lee is the author of the 2001 short story collection, "Yellow," and the 2004 novel, "Country of Origin." The novel won the American Book Award, a Mixed Media Watch Image Award for Outstanding Fiction and the Edgar Award for Best First Novel. "Yellow" won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Lee's new novel, "Wrack and Ruin," will be published by W.W. Norton in April.

Lee, who lives in Saint Paul, Minn., is an associate professor teaching creative writing at Macalester College. Recently he received the inaugural Fred R. Brown Literary Award for emerging novelists from the University of Pittsburgh's creative writing program.

He has received an O. Henry Award and a Pushcart Prize, and his stories have been published in GQ, New England Review, The North American Review, Bamboo Ridge, Manoa, Narrative and Glimmer Train, among others, and in the anthologies "Charlie Chan Is Dead 2" and "Screaming Monkeys." His book reviews and essays have appeared in The Boston Globe, Harvard Review, Agni, Boston magazine, The Village Voice and other magazines.

The son of a career State Department officer, Lee, a third-generation Korean American, spent the majority of his childhood in Tokyo and Seoul. He received a B.A. in English literature from the University of California-Los Angeles and an M.F.A. in creative writing and literature from Emerson College.