Jennie Li is a writer from Honolulu, Hawai‘i. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and an MA from the University of California, Davis, where she received the Elliot Gilbert Memorial Prize in fiction. Her work explores migration, displacement, and inherited memory, drawing on her father’s emigration from Pakse, Laos, and her mother’s from Icheon, South Korea. She is currently at work on a novel about a civilian Laotian family fleeing their homeland near the end of the Secret War.

She is currently a 2025–2026 Steinbeck Fellow at San José State University.