Chin-Sun Lee
Chin-Sun Lee is the youngest child of North Korean exiles, both her parents having fled their native provinces for Seoul at the outset of the Korean War. After a long career in fashion design, she earned an MFA in Creative Writing at The New School in New York. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Joyland, Your Impossible Voice, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, and The Believer Logger, among other publications. She?s also a contributor to the New York Times bestselling anthology Women in Clothes (Blue Rider Press/Penguin 2014) and has participated in the Blood Jet and Lady Fest Reading Series in New Orleans, the Franklin Park, Earshot, and Renegade Reading Series in Brooklyn, and the inaugural Riverviews Artspace event in Lynchburg. She currently lives in New Orleans, working on her second novel. Upcountry is her debut.
Upcountry is the story of three women whose lives intersect in a small town in the Catskills. Here, we follow April Ives, a single mother from a working-class background whose family has lived in Caliban for generations. April is an interesting character, resourceful and resilient in a way reminiscent of the terse, masculine protagonist Llewelyn Moss in No Country for Old Men, but ultimately able to reach farther by valuing human connection. Her story, and the intersection of all three women's stories, says something new about what it takes to retain autonomy and integrity in a rural American crucible.