Julia Lee is a Korean American writer, scholar, and teacher. She is the author of Our Gang: A Racial History of The Little Rascals and The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel, as well as the novel, By The Book, which was published under the pen name Julia Sonneborn. She is an associate professor of English at Loyola Marymount University, where she teaches Black and Asian American literature. She lives with her family in Los Angeles.
Her newest book is Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America. In the vein of Eloquent Rage and Minor Feelings, it’s a passionate, no-holds-barred memoir about the Asian American experience in a nation defined by racial stratification. With prose by turns scathing and heart-wrenching, Julia Lee lays bare the complex disorientation and shame that stems from this country’s imposed racial hierarchy to argue that Asian Americans must leverage their liminality for lasting social change alongside Black and brown communities.
“Biting the Hand—vivid, powerful, and empathetic—grapples with the story of how ‘America’ got made, is made, and will be made. The harshness of this story is often forgotten or misused. This book reminds us of some of its complicated truth.” —Jamaica Kincaid, author of A Small Place
