Don Lee was born in 1959 in Tokyo, Japan, to parents that were second-generation Korean Americans. His father was a career diplomat for the U.S. State Department. Lee spent most of his childhood in Tokyo and Seoul. He originally majored in engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles but found it boring; an English teacher encouraged him to take a creative writing class, and doing so determined his career path. He graduated from UCLA with a bachelor’s degree in English literature then went to Emerson College in Boston for a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing and literature.

After graduation, Lee taught a creative writing workshop at Emerson for three years and then took over as managing editor and assistant fiction editor of Ploughshares, a famous and highly respected literary magazine. He became the editor of Ploughshares in 1988. He also occasionally...