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. She was also a finalist for the 2020 Iowa Review Award in fiction. Her writing explores themes of migration, displacement, and inherited memory, drawing from her father’s emigration from Pakse, Laos, her mother’s emigration from Icheon, South Korea, and her upbringing in Hawaiʻi. She is working on a novel that follows a civilian Laotian family as they flee their homeland near the end of the civil war.

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