Marie Myung-Ok Lee is a passionate and lucid writer whose current area of focus is the environment's impact on human health. The Writer-in-Residence at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University, Lee is currently at work on her second book, "The United States of Autism," which looks at how the increasing pollution in our environment plus the dramatic increase in the number of mandated vaccines have coincided with an alarming rise in a disorder so difficult to endure that it has a 90 percent divorce rate.

"The burden of neurotoxic chemicals and heavy metals in our environment is only increasing," says Lee. "The United States of Autism seeks to explore whether today's generation of children with varying forms of autism, Asperger's and ADHD are indeed canaries in a coal mine." Sections of the work in progress have been published in Newsweek and Brain, Child, and earned Lee a fellowship to the MacDowell Colony.

Lee's essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Norton anthology New Worlds of Literature, among other publications. She received a Fulbright fellowship to research her novel, Somebody's Daughter (Beacon Press, 2005).