Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of The Beautiful Immunity (Tupelo Press, 2024), Duress (Cascade Books, Poiema Series, 2022), Rose is a Verb: Neo-Georgics (W&S/Slant, 2021), Phyla of Joy (Tupelo Press, 2012), Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008), a July Open selection, and In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize selected by Heather McHugh and the Norma Farber First Book Award chosen by Cole Swensen for the Poetry Society of America. Hereseventh collection, Awake: A Vigil, or an Instance of Human is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Lee also authored four novels, Sonata in K (Ellipsis Press, 2017), The Maze of Transparencies (Ellipsis Press, 2019), and Love Chronicles of the Octopodes (Ellipsis Press, 2023). Marimo, Mon Amour (University of Alabama Press/FC2, forthcoming 2026) won the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Innovative Fiction. A book of criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora (Cambria, 2013), appears in the Cambria World Sinophone Series. Her volume of Song Dynasty translations, Doubled Radiance: Poetry & Prose by Li Qingzhao, is the first in English to collect Li’s poetry and prose in a single volume (Singing Bone Press, 2018). Lee also wrote two chapbooks, God’s One Hundred Promises, winner of the Swan Scythe Press Prize awarded by Sandra McPherson in 2002, and What the Sea Earns for a Living (Quaci Press, 2014). Currently, Lee serves in the administration at Wheaton College in Illinois.
