Susan Choi

Susan Choi is a critically acclaimed American novelist, professor, and literary voice known for her deeply psychological fiction and exploration of cultural identity. Born in 1969 in South Bend, Indiana, to a Korean father and Jewish-American mother, she moved with her mother to Houston after her parents’ divorce. Choi holds a B.A. in Literature from Yale University and an M.F.A. from Cornell, and later worked as a fact-checker at The New Yorker before embarking on her writing career . She now teaches creative writing at Johns Hopkins University and resides in Brooklyn, New York MacDowell+11The Writing Seminars+11+11.

As an author, Choi has published six major novels—The Foreign Student (1998), American Woman (2003), A Person of Interest (2008), My Education (2013), Trust Exercise (2019), and her forthcoming Flashlight (June 3, 2025). Her debut won the Asian American Literary Award, and American Woman was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. Trust Exercise earned the National Book Award for Fiction in 2019, and Flashlight explores four generations of a Korean family against a backdrop of historical research and emotional complexity +15+15+15.