Marie G. Lee

Marie G. Lee was born in April 25, 1964, in Hibbing, Minnesota. Her parents were immigrants from Korea who came to the United States a decade earlier. Like the Sungs in Finding My Voice, her family was the only Korean family in town and her father worked as a doctor. Lee liked to dream and read as a child, often more than she enjoyed making friends. She was drawn to books with alienated characters, such as S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders (1967). Lee also began writing when she was quite young, though she did not share her stories and poems with anyone until she was much older.

Entering Brown University to become a doctor, Lee changed her academic focus and earned a degree in economics in 1986. To please her family, she then pursued a professional career, first as a consultant at Standard and Poor's, then as an...