Young Jean Lee, playwright and author of The Shipment, engages in conversation with Columbia College’s John Green.

Young Jean Lee is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and was named by American Theatre magazine as one of the twenty-five artists who will shape the American theater over the next twenty-five years. She was born in Korea, grew up in Pullman, Washington, and attended college at University of California Berkeley, where she majored in English. Immediately after college, she entered Berkeley’s English Ph.D. program, where she studied Shakespeare for six years before moving to New York to become a playwright in 2002. Since then, she has directed her plays at Soho Rep, the Kitchen, the Public Theater, P.S. 122, HERE Arts Center, and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, and performed in her play We’re Gonna Die (with band Future Wife) at Joe’s Pub. She has worked with Radiohole and the National Theater of the United States of America. She is a member of New Dramatists and 13P, has done residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, and Hedgebrook, and has an M.F.A. from Mac Wellman’s playwriting program at Brooklyn College. Lee is currently under commission from Plan B/Paramount Pictures, Lincoln Center Theater, Playwrights Horizons, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

This event contains explicit language and adult themes.

Story Week Festival of Writers features some of the best, most diverse voices at work today in fiction, film, theater, art, music, and publishing. Other events from this festival recorded by Chicago Amplified—listed in the order they were presented—are as follows:

2nd Story
Reading/Grad Open Mic Featuring Megan Stielstra
Bonnie Jo Campbell and Don DeGrazia
Bonnie Jo Campbell and Donna Seaman
Portraits of an American Dream: The Female in Contemporary Fiction
Full Time Fiction Writing Faculty Reading featuring Betty Shiflett
Beyond the Dream: What It Takes to Get Published
From Page to Stage: Scenes From Student Playwrights
Conversation with Playwright Young Jean Lee
Surviving the American Dream
Reading, Conversation, and Book Signing with John Sayles
Literary Rock & Roll: American Dreamers with Heidi W. Durrow, John Sayles, Patricia Ann McNair, musical guest Canasta
Chicago Classics

Recorded Wednesday, March 21, 2012 at Stage Two.