Susan Choi is a highly acclaimed American novelist, best known for her compelling fiction stories. She was born in South Bend, Indiana in 1969 to a Jewish mother and a Korean father. After her parents' divorce when she was nine, she moved with her mother to Houston, Texas. Choi later attended Yale University, where she studied literature, and subsequently earned a Master of Fine Arts from Cornell University.
Choi's literary career began when she worked as a fact-checker for The New Yorker. Her debut novel, "The Foreign Student," was published in 1998 and won the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction. This was followed by "American Woman" in 2003, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Choi has also been a Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, and won the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award for "A Person of Interest." Her latest novel, "Trust Exercise," won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction and was a national bestseller.
In addition to her standalone books, Choi has co-edited the anthology "Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker" and has contributed non-fiction pieces to various publications, including Vogue, Tin House, Allure, O, The New York Times, and in anthologies such as "Money Changes Everything" and "Brooklyn Was Mine." She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Choi currently resides in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, Pete Wells, and their two sons, Dexter and Elliot.