Lisa Ko

Lisa Ko
Born	New York City, U.S.
Alma mater	Wesleyan University
Occupation(s)	Writer, editor
Notable work	The Leavers Memory Piece
Awards	PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, National Book Award for Fiction finalist
Website	lisa-ko.com

Lisa Ko is an American writer. Her debut novel, The Leavers, was a national bestseller, won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction. Her short fiction has been published in Best American Short Stories and McSweeney's and her essays in The New York Times and The Believer.^[1][2] Ko's second novel, Memory Piece, was published in 2024.

Born in New York City, Ko grew up in suburban New Jersey, the only child of Chinese immigrants from the Philippines.^[3][4] She began writing stories and keeping a journal at the age of five, though she only shared the work with others in high school. As a child, Ko and her parents ran a stand at craft shows and flea markets, an experience which later inspired her novel writing process.^[5] She attended Wesleyan University, majoring in English.

Ko moved back to New York City in the late 1990s, where she worked in print magazines and had an early online diary called Incommunicado.net.^[6] She took writing classes after work, including one at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop taught by Jhumpa Lahiri where her classmates included Cathy Park Hong, Ed Lin, and Min Jin Lee.^[7] She lived in San Francisco in the early 2000s, where she was one of the founders of Hyphen magazine, serving as books editor.^[8]

Ko earned a master's degree in Library and Information Sciences from San Jose State University in 2005 while working at a film production company.^[9][10] She received an MFA from the City College of New York in 2012, taking classes at night while working three day jobs.^[11][12]

Ko's writing has been described as "exquisite," "draw[ing] characters with such deftness that they feel wholly alive."^[13][14] Her nonfiction has been called "revealing and wickedly perceptive."^[15] Her writing often features music.^[16] She has been referred to as "one of the few more popular contemporary Asian American writers whose writing does not pander to white audiences."^[17]

In an interview in Electric Literature, Ko says that her novels "look at the relationship of Asian Americans to the US imperial project. They both also touch on the gap and tension between the stories we are told and stories we tell ourselves, and the importance—and complications—of community."^[18]

Ko is the recipient of fellowships from Hedgebrook, MacDowell, the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Ucross, Blue Mountain Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, among others.^[19] She has been a guest speaker at many schools, book festivals, and universities and has taught creative writing at Indiana University, the New School, the City College of New York, the One Story Summer Writers Conference, and in many community settings.^[20] In 2019, she taught in the DREAMing Out Loud program at Queens College.^[21] Her work is often taught in high school and college classes throughout the United States.^[22][23]

Ko published her first novel, The Leavers, with Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2017^[24] after winning the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Established by Barbara Kingsolver, the prize awards $25,000 as well as a book contract for a work of previously unpublished fiction engaging social justice topics.^[25] Ko submitted her novel for the prize after working on it for seven years, as part of her goal to receive 50 literary-related rejections in one year.^[26] The book follows Polly, an undocumented immigrant from China to the United States, and her son Deming, who is adopted by a white couple when Polly goes missing.^[27]

The Leavers was inspired by a 2009 New York Times story about an undocumented immigrant woman who was held, largely in solitary confinement, for more than a year and a half.^[28] Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Gish Jen said Ko's book "has taken the headlines and reminded us that beyond them lie messy, brave, extraordinary, ordinary lives."^[29]

The Leavers was a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award for fiction.^[30] The judges’ citation called it "a bold reinvention of the Asian immigrant novel as great American novel."^[31] It was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and won the Asian Pacific American Award for Adult Fiction.^[32][33]

The novel was a national best seller and named one of the best books of the year by NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Buzzfeed, The Los Angeles Times, Electric Literature and the Irish Times.^[34]

In 2024, Ko published her second novel, Memory Piece, with Riverhead Books. The book was inspired by early internet culture, performance art, malls, and the challenges of surveillance capitalism.^[35] Described as "queer not only in content but in form" and "a book about the triumph of community, friendship, and love," the novel follows three friends, a performance artist, a tech coder, and a housing activist, from the 1980s to the 2040s, using New York City as a microcosm of the larger political economy of the US.^[36][37][38]

Lily Meyer, writing for The Atlantic, says that "Memory Piece asks what hopes are worth clinging to, what parts of society are worth participating in, what powers are worth putting in the energy to fight. It belongs to an American literary tradition that includes Dana Spiotta, George Saunders, and their patron saint, Don DeLillo: writers whose characters sense that their lives happen at the whim of forces too enormous to understand or evade, but set out to dodge them anyway."

At The Guardian, Holly Williams noted that "Ko writes with a cool, collected intelligence and is unafraid to wrangle big ideas."^[39]

Barack Obama named Memory Piece as one of the selections on his Summer 2024 Reading List.^[40] Emma Roberts selected the book as the April 2024 read for the Belletrist Book Club.^[41] It received Best Book of the Year honors from Time, NPR, and Vogue and was longlisted for the New American Voices Prize.^[42][43]

Along with writer Aisha Gawad, Ko became embroiled in controversy after objecting to participating on a panel at the Albany Book Festival, sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute. Accounts of the correspondence between Ko and festival representatives differ. Multiple news outlets published screenshots of excerpts from emails sent to Elisa Albert, sent by the Writers Institute's Mark Koplik to Albert, in which Koplik wrote “We have a crazy situation developing...Basically, not to sugar coat this, Aisha Gawad and Lisa Ko don't want to be on a panel with a ‘Zionist.’”[1] While Albert wanted to proceed with the panel, it was canceled by the Albany Book Festival, resulting in outrage over the de-platforming of a writer based on her Jewish identity.

In response to the panel's cancellation, PEN America issued the following statement:

“It is deeply distressing that any writer would be denied the opportunity to speak and engage in conversation about their craft because of their identity.  All writers have a right to make decisions about where they participate and how, but it is tragic and outrageous to see that result in other writers being silenced and discriminated against. In these contentious times, we believe it is critical to maintain a commitment to dialogue and engagement. At its best, literature can be a bridge across difference, and a vital alternative to exclusion and censorship.”^[44]

Ko has said that she did not decline to be on the panel, but "merely expressed concern about the decision to put Gawad, a Muslim author, on the same panel as Albert."^[45] Ko told the Times Union, “I never refused to participate on the panel, and the accusation that I withdrew because the moderator is Jewish, or that I am unwilling to appear onstage with someone who is Jewish, is hurtful and completely false...misinformation that has gone on to foster an increasingly hostile response toward myself and others, including defamation and death threats.”^[46] When asked for her response, Albert stated: "I was told that the two demanded I be replaced, and when that wasn't an option they boycotted. At this point, there is some concrete repair and learning and commitment to doing better that can and will be demanded of our institutions.”

• The Leavers. Algonquin Books. 2017. ISBN 978-1616206888.
• Memory Piece. Riverhead Books. 2024. ISBN 978-0593542101.

• "Celestial City" in McSweeney's
• "Nightlife" in Small Odysseys: Selected Shorts
• "The Contractors"
• "Pat + Sam" in Copper Nickel and Best American Short Stories 2016
• "Proper Girls" in One Story

• "How Writing a Novel is Like Wandering a Flea Market" in Literary Hub
• "Dream Futures" in The Rumpus
• "Distancing #6: Rock ’n Soul Part 1" in The Believer
• "Literary Institutions Are Pressuring Authors to Remain Silent About Gaza" in TruthOut
• "Seeking the Comfort of an Old Flame: Solitude" in The New York Times
• "What 'White' Food Meant to a First-Generation Kid" in The New York Times
• "Harvard and the Myth of the Interchangeable Asian" in The New York Times
• "An American Woman Quits Smiling" in The New York Times
• "Why It Matters That ‘Emily Doe’ in the Brock Turner Case Is Asian-American" in The New York Times
• "Not Finishing My Novel Would Have Ruined My Life" in Literary Hub
• "20 Lessons on How to Be American" in The Offing

• "An audacious memoir from Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of 'The Sympathizer'" in The Washington Post
• "After a Camping Trip, Five Girls' Lives Are No Longer the Same" in The New York Times Book Review
• "War Fractures" in Los Angeles Review of Books

• Official website