Susan Choi

Choi grew up in Indiana and Texas, the daughter of a Korean immigrant mathematician and an American mother, studied at Yale and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and worked briefly as a fact-checker at The New Yorker before publishing her first novel, The Foreign Student, in 1998.

Trust Exercise (2019) opens as a seemingly straightforward account of two teenagers' intense affair at a competitive performing-arts high school under a charismatic, manipulative teacher, then abruptly reframes the entire first half as another character's memoir decades later, exposing how memory, power, and authorship distort every version of the same events; it won the National Book Award.

She has continued writing formally inventive fiction, including American Woman and Flashlight, and teaches creative writing at Yale, dividing her attention between fiction and criticism.