Lee Montgomery

Social Media

“Profoundly imaginative…Lee responds to texts with same empathetic acuity she brings to her own writing.”

—Deborah Eisenberg

Lee Montgomery is the author of The Things Between Us, Whose World Is This?, and Searching for Emily: Illustrated. 

The Things Between Us received the 2007 Oregon Book Award and was a four-star critic’s choice for People magazine. Whose World Is This? received the 2007 John Simmons Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the 2008 Ken Kesey Award in Fiction. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications including most recently the New York Times Magazine, Oprah, Story, Glimmer Train, Antioch Review, Iowa Review, and Tin House, among others. She received a MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workhop.

Lee has over twenty-five years working as an editor for literary magazines such as The Iowa Review, The Santa Monica Review, and Tin House and book companies as an associate publisher, editorial director, ghostwriter, and editor. She spent over a decade at Tin House where she was the founding editorial director and associate publisher at Tin House Books, an executive editor with Tin House magazine, and the founding director of the Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop. At Tin House Books, Lee edited and oversaw the making of many novels and memoirs, among other projects. Through her work at the Iowa Review, the Santa Monica Review and Tin House, Lee worked with and published some of the most influential literary authors of our time: William Gass, David Foster Wallace, John Barth, Robert Coover, Stacey Levine, Kathy Acker, Diane Williams, Susan Daitch, Curtis White, Ronald Sukenik, Denis Johnson, Deborah Eisenberg, Marilynne Robinson, Aimee Bender, Harlan Ellison, Robert Crais, Michelle Latiolais, Jim Krusoe, T.C. Boyle, Rikki Dukornet, etc. She has also edited anthologies including Transgressions, Absolute Disaster, Woof, the World Within, and The Writer’s Notebook, among many others.

As a senior book editor for Dove Books in Beverly Hills, Lee edited(and ghostwrote) numerous celebrity memoirs including producer Robert Evans’ The Kid Stays in the Picture, Shattered by Faye Resnick, Jackson Family Values, Memories of Madison County, You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again, Biology of Love, How You Get Sick and How You Get Well by Arthur Janov, An Unseemly Man by Larry Flynt, Madame Foreman by Tom Byrnes and other memoirs about being jurors on the OJ Simpson Trial. She has also worked as a ghostwriter, proposal writer, and editor privately. She ghostwrote Fall Down Laughing, a memoir by by David Lander (Squiggy on “Laverne and Shirley”), worked on a variety of proposals for celebrity type memoirs (including Sid Luft on his marriage to Judy Garland), and edited numerous ebooks for Shebooks.