Stacey Lee

Lee is a fourth-generation Chinese-American.[2] Her family on her mother's side originally came to America in the 1800s, but wasn't permitted to stay due to the Chinese Exclusion Act.[2] Her father immigrated to San Francisco in 1953.[2][3] She grew up in southern California and has two sisters.[2][1][4] Lee wrote her first novel when she was nine and says that she always wanted to become a writer.[1] Lee graduated from UCLA and has a J.D. degree from UC Davis School of Law.[1] She practiced law in Silicon Valley for a few years prior to becoming an author.[1]

Lee is also the legal director of the non-profit organization We Need Diverse Books and is one of the founders of the movement.[2][5]

Lee is married and has two children, a daughter and a son.[2]

Her debut novel, Under a Painted Sky, about a Chinese-American girl and an African-American girl who travel the Oregon Trail during the gold rush was published in 2016.[6] She was inspired to write Under the Painted Sky based on her complex family history in the 1800s and chose a Chinese-American protagonist who doesn't speak Chinese like her.[2] Aside from similarities in the main character's upbringing and her own, she chose not to incorporate details of her family history into the novel.[2]

Outrun the Moon, her second novel, set during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, about a Chinese-American teen struggling to escape her family's circle of poverty, was published the same year.[5] She drew on her family history again for the novel and did field research traveling to various locations in the novel, among them Chinatown and the Golden Gate Park.[3]

Her next novel, Luck of the Titanic, about a Chinese teenager boarding the RMS Titanic secretly, due to the Chinese Exclusion Act in place, was published by G.P. Putnam's Books for Young Readers in May 2021.[7]

Lee's Winston Chu Duology will debut in 2022 with Winston Chu Versus the Whimsies. The series is based on Chinese mythology and will be published under the Rick Riordan Presents imprint.[8]

Novels

• Under a Painted Sky (G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, 2016)
• Outrun the Moon (G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, 2016)
• The Secret of a Heart Note (Katherine Tegen Books, 2016)
• The Downstairs Girl (G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, 2019)
• Luck of the Titanic (G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, 2021)

Short stories

• "Land of the Sweet, Home of the Brave" in The Radical Element (Candlewick Press, 2018)

Won

• 2016 SCBWI Crystal Kite Award for Under a Painted Sky[9]
• 2016-2017 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature for Outrun the Moon[10]
• 2017 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Young Adult for Outrun the Moon[11]

Nominated

• 2017-2018 Missouri Gateway Readers Award for Under a Painted Sky[12]