Lee Cole was born and grew up in rural Kentucky. He's a 2019 graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was awarded the Maytag Fellowship and taught courses focused on rural and Appalachian fiction. Lee was in the same class at Iowa as Brandon Taylor, Kiley Reid and Pam Zhang. He was recently selected as a 2020 Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow. He lives in Queens.
'Beautifully textured ... his realism a meld of Richard Russo and Anne Tyler by way of Sally Rooney.' - New York Times 'Who doesn't love a campus novel? Groundskeeping, a stellar addition to the canon, is a tender novel of precise pleasures ... At once a bittersweet coming-of-age story and a lovely romance.' - Esquire, Best Books of 2022 (so far) 'Cole's robust, deeply satisfying debut novel ... exposes a divided America as class conflicts and arguments over immigration, religion, and education shape relationships and magically infuse a bit of optimism to propel the story forward.' - National Book Review