DJ Lee holds a MFA in creative nonfiction and a PhD in 19th-century literature. She is Regents Professor of English at Washington State University, where she teaches creative writing and literature.

She has written or edited seven books on the environment, British poetry, and travel literature, most recently The Land Speaks: New Voices at the Intersection of Oral and Environmental History (Oxford University Press, 2017). She has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant, an Idaho Humanities Grant, the Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, and the Arctic Circle Artist Residency.

 

In addition, she has published over 25 creative nonfiction essays in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Terrain, Narrative, and Vela among other journals and anthologies.  These have been contest finalists and received a Pushcart Prize special mention. She serves as a board member at large for the Selway-Bitterroot Frank Church Foundation.