Susan Choi

Born in 1969 in South Bend, Indiana, United States, to a Korean father and an American Jewish mother, Choi attended public schools. When she was nine years old, her parents divorced. She and her mother moved to Houston, Texas, where she attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.^[1] Choi earned a B.A. degree in Literature from Yale University (1990) and an M.F.A. from Cornell University.^[2]

After receiving her graduate degree, she worked for The New Yorker as a fact checker. At this job she met her husband, Pete Wells, whom she married. They separated in 2016 but continue to share a house in Brooklyn and co-parent their two sons.^[3][4][2]

Choi published her first novel, The Foreign Student, in 1998. It won the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award.^{[citation needed]} In 2000, she edited (with David Remnick) Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker, an anthology of short fiction.

Her second novel, American Woman (2003), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in literature.^[5] In 2010, she won the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award for A Person of Interest, which was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2009.^[6]

In 2014, her fourth novel, My Education, won the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction.^[7]

As of May 2018, Choi was working on a novel employing conventions of memoir and reportage that "takes up the question of national identity, and the extent to which it coincides or does not coincide with ethnic and with cultural identity."^[8] In 2019, she published her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, which won the National Book Award for Fiction.^[9]

In 2025, Choi published her sixth novel, Flashlight.^{[10][11][12][13][14][15][16]} It was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.^[17] In September 2025, Flashlight was selected for the shortlist.^[18]

Choi teaches creative writing at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.^[19]

• Asian American Literary Award for Fiction for The Foreign Student
• Steven Turner Award for The Foreign Student
• National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient (2001)
• Guggenheim Fellow (2004).
• PEN/W.G. Sebald Award (2010) for A Person of Interest
• Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction for My Education (2014)^[20]
• National Book Award for Fiction for Trust Exercise (2019)^[21]
• Sunday Times Short Story Award (2021) for Flashlight^[22]