Helen Elaine Lee

Helen Elaine Lee practised law in Washington, D.C. before publishing fiction, and the machinery of courts and prisons has stayed in her subject matter. Born in Detroit in 1959 to an attorney father and a mother who taught comparative literature at college level, she read law at Harvard, finishing in 1985. She now teaches fiction writing at MIT, where she also directs the programme in Women's and Gender Studies. Pomegranate, her third novel, appeared in 2023, well over two decades after The Serpent's Gift and Water Marked. Its narrator, Ranita Atwater, walks out of Oak Hills Correctional Center at the end of a four-year sentence for drug possession, three years sober, hoping to be a mother again to two children who have grown up without her, and leaving behind the woman she loved inside. Lee helped set up PEN New England's creative writing programme for people in prison and sat on its Freedom to Write committee.