Stacey Heather Lee^[1] is an American author of young adult fiction, best known for Under a Painted Sky and Outrun the Moon. Her works tend to be contemporary and historical fiction, with some magical elements.

Lee is a fourth-generation Chinese-American.^[2] Her family on her mother's side originally came to America in the 1800s, but wasn't permitted to stay due to the Chinese Exclusion Act.^[2] Her father immigrated to San Francisco in 1953.^[2][3] She grew up in southern California and has two sisters.^[2][1][4] Lee wrote her first novel when she was nine and says that she always wanted to become a writer.^[1] Lee graduated from UCLA and has a J.D. degree from UC Davis School of Law.^[1] She practiced law in Silicon Valley for a few years prior to becoming an author.^[1]

Lee is also the legal director of the non-profit organization We Need Diverse Books and is one of the founders of the movement.^[2][5]

Lee is married and has two children, a daughter and a son.^[2]

Her debut novel, Under a Painted Sky, about a Chinese-American girl and an African-American girl who travel the Oregon Trail during the gold rush was published in 2016.^[6] She was inspired to write Under the Painted Sky based on her complex family history in the 1800s and chose a Chinese-American protagonist who doesn't speak Chinese like her.^[2] Aside from similarities in the main character's upbringing and her own, she chose not to incorporate details of her family history into the novel.^[2]

Outrun the Moon, her second novel, set during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, about a Chinese-American teen struggling to escape her family's circle of poverty, was published the same year.^[5] She drew on her family history again for the novel and did field research traveling to various locations in the novel, among them Chinatown and the Golden Gate Park.^[3]

Her next novel, Luck of the Titanic, about a Chinese teenager boarding the RMS Titanic secretly, due to the Chinese Exclusion Act in place, was published by G.P. Putnam's Books for Young Readers in May 2021.^[7]

Lee's Winston Chu Duology will debut in 2022 with Winston Chu Versus the Whimsies. The series is based on Chinese mythology and will be published under the Rick Riordan Presents imprint.^[8]

Novels

• Under a Painted Sky (G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, 2016)
• Outrun the Moon (G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, 2016)
• The Secret of a Heart Note (Katherine Tegen Books, 2016)
• The Downstairs Girl (G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, 2019)
• Luck of the Titanic (G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, 2021)

Short stories

• "Land of the Sweet, Home of the Brave" in The Radical Element (Candlewick Press, 2018)

Won

• 2016 SCBWI Crystal Kite Award for Under a Painted Sky^[9]
• 2016-2017 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature for Outrun the Moon^[10]
• 2017 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Young Adult for Outrun the Moon^[11]

Nominated

• 2017-2018 Missouri Gateway Readers Award for Under a Painted Sky^[12]