James Yeh

James Yeh is a writer, editor, and journalist.

His reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Guardian, The Believer, Columbia Journalism Review, and VICE. His fiction has appeared in The Drift, McSweeney’s Quarterly, NOON, Tin House, and Dissent. Along the way he has co-translated Alejandro Zambra for Harper’s, published poetry in New York Tyrant, and produced a podcast segment for The Organist.

Yeh graduated from Clemson University in 2005 with a BA in English; he earned an MFA in fiction from Columbia University in 2009. A two-time MacDowell fellow (2011 and 2024), he was named an emerging writers fellow at the Center for Fiction in 2011; a writer-in-residence at the Hub City Writers Project in 2014; and a visiting writer at the Black Mountain Institute in 2019.

He is a contributing editor at BOMB Magazine. Formerly, he was deputy editor at McSweeney’s Quarterly, features editor at The Believer, and culture editor at VICE, where stories he edited were selected for the O. Henry Prize, The Best American Short Stories, and The Best American Travel Writing. He is currently the nonfiction advisor and advisor to Quarto in Columbia's Undergraduate Creative Writing Program.