The Sidney Harman Writer-In-Residence Program
Susan Choi
Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence
Fall 2006
“She never meant to become a familiar face anywhere, yet she'd find herself chatting with people. Introducing herself to the hardware-store owner, the train conductor, the librarian. Compensating, she knew, for her strangeness—not just her strangeness to this town, but her lone Asian face. Trying to out-flank suspicion. Sometimes she longed for a companion, to fulfill this desire for acceptance. A confidante, to make sure that she didn't break down and confide in the plumber.”
— From American Woman
Susan Choi is the author of two novels: The Foreign Student, which won the Asian-American Literary Award and the Steven Turner Award for first fiction in 1999; and American Woman, a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. In 2000 she was co-editor, along with New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick, of the anthology Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker.
Her nonfiction has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Tin House, The Believer, and Vogue. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is also a member of the Author’s Guild Council and has taught creative writing at Cornell, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Stern College, and Brooklyn College.
Currently at work on a third novel, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Pete Wells, and their son, Dexter.
A review of Ms. Choi's new book, A Person of Interest.
"Tampering with Truth:
What Fiction can do with Historical Facts"


Above photos from: A Reading and Conversation with Susan Choi
in the Newman Conference Center,
7th Floor, 151 East 25th Street,
co-sponsored by the Great Works Program and Poets & Writers.
Return to Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence home page.
Past Writers-in-Residence
- Spring 2008: Charles Simic
- Fall 2007: Sigrid Nunez
- Spring 2007: Mark Kurlansky
- Fall 2006: Susan Choi
- Spring 2006: Carol Muske-Dukes
- Fall 2005: Francisco Goldman
- Spring 2005: Ben Katchor
- Fall 2004: William Finnegan
- Spring 2004: Colum McCann
- Fall 2003: April Bernard
- Spring 2003: Anita Desai
- Fall 2002: Philip Gourevitch
- Spring 2002: Paul Auster
- Fall 2001: John Edgar Wideman
- Spring 2001: Agha Shahid Ali
- Fall 2000: Edward Albee
- Spring 2000: Lorrie Moore
- Fall 1999: Jane Kramer
- Spring 1999: Tony Kushner
- Fall 1998: Yehuda Amichai
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