Susan Choi was born in South Bend, IN, where her father is a professor of mathematics, and raised in Houston, TX after her parents divorced. After graduating from Yale (1990; Literature BA) and Cornell (1995; MFA in fiction) she moved to New York and worked for several years as a fact-checker at The New Yorker. Her first novel, The Foreign Student, was published in 1998 and awarded the Asian-American Literary Award and the Steven Turner Award for the Novel in1999. In 2000, she published Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker, an anthology of New Yorker fiction she co-edited with New Yorker editor David Remnick. Her second novel, American Woman, was published by in 2003 and was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize, and her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2009.
She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors. She is a member of the Authors’ Guild Council, PEN, and other professional organizations, and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
