JC Lee

JC's Affiliations: Pitt Prison Education Project

JC Lee (any pronoun) is interested in the essay in its many forms—personal, critical, nature, lyric, list. JC regularly teaches Readings in Contemporary Nonfiction, as well as Art of the Essay and a variety of Introductions to. Other courses include Environmental Writing, Writing the Body, and Lyric Essay. JC also teaches in the Pitt Prison Education Project, where Pitt students and incarcerated students read and write together. JC’s essays have appeared in VQR, Hotel Amerika, Mid-American Review, Jelly Bucket, Critical Quarterly, and elsewhere. The recipient of a 2017 Edward Albee Foundation Fellowship, in 2023 JC was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship to work on a book-length essay about the self-taught painter John Kane and Pittsburgh’s trees. (JC has also made a short film about John and Pittsburgh’s urban forest.) JC’s essay, “Mother River,” won VQR’s 2023 Staige D. Blackford Prize, and most recently, JC was awarded a Blue Mountain Residency where she finished a book of essays on Pittsburgh, magic, and working class bodies.