Rebecca Lee

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Rebecca Lee has published short stories and essays in The Atlantic Monthly and Zoetrope, and her work has been broadcast on National Public Radio. She is finishing a novel titled The City Is A Rising Tide, which is concerned with nonprofits, unrequited love, and the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze.

At Radcliffe, Lee will write a screenplay titled Emerson and Thoreau: The Winter of 1842. The work will tell the story of the complex friendship between the two men and the love they both felt for Emerson's wife, Lidian. In addition to their reserved, epistolary love triangle in the winter of 1842, the narrative dramatizes Emerson’s very public break with the church, and includes portraits of his wider circle of friends and neighbors—Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Jones Very, and William and Henry James.

Lee is a professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She was a Halls fellow at the University of Wisconsin and a winner of the Rona Jaffe Award and the National Magazine Award in 2001 for fiction. She earned her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.