Helen Elaine Lee
Helen Elaine Lee is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. Her first novel, The Serpent's Gift, was published by Atheneum and her second, Water Marked, was published by Scribner. Her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Callaloo, Best African American Fiction 2009, and Solstice Literary Magazine. Her novel Pomegranate, published in 2023 by Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books, was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, won the Publishing Triangle 2024 Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction, was a finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and was named one of the 20 Best Books of 2023 by Amazon. This journey of healing follows Ranita Atwater as she gets out of prison after a four-year bid for opiate possession and strives to stay clean, repair her relationships with her kids, grapple with the past, and both own and tell her story.