for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Lee's next novel, On Such a Full Sea (2014) is set in a dystopian future version of the American city of Baltimore, Maryland called B-Mor where the main character, Fan, is a Chinese-American laborer working as a diver in a fish farm. It was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2016, Lee joined the faculty of Stanford University, where he is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of English. He previously taught creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. He was also a Shinhan Distinguished Visiting Professor at Yonsei University in South Korea. Lee has compared his writing process to spelunking. "You kind of create the right path for yourself. But, boy, are there so many points at which you think, absolutely, I'm going down the wrong hole here. And I can't get back to the right hole." Major themes Lee explores issues central to the Asian-American experience: the legacy of the past; the encounter of diverse cultures; the challenges of racism and discrimination, and exclusion; dreams achieved and dreams deferred. In the process of developing and defining itself, then, Asian-American literature speaks to the very heart of what it means to be American. The authors of this literature above all concern themselves with identity, with the question of becoming and being American, of being accepted, not "foreign." Lee's writings have addressed these questions of identity, exile and diaspora, assimilation, and alienation. Awards and honors 1995 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for Native Speaker 1996 Pen/Hemingway Award for Native Speaker NAIBA Book of the Year Award for A Gesture Life 2000 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for A Gesture Life 2011 Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for The Surrendered 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for The Surrendered 2015 ALA Notable Book of the Year for On Such A Full Sea 2017 John Dos Passos Prize for Literature Bibliography Books Native Speaker (Riverhead, 1994) A Gesture Life (Riverhead, 1999) Aloft (Riverhead, 2004) The Surrendered (Riverhead, 2010) On Such a Full Sea (Riverhead, 2014) My Year Abroad (2021) Articles Screenplays Coming Home Again (co-written and directed by Wayne Wang, 2019) References External links "Mute in an English-Only World", an essay by Lee in the anthology Dream Me Home Safely: Writers on Growing Up in America, at Google Books Interview with