Mackenzi Lee

Mackenzi Lee (born van Engelenhoven) ’14MFA is an author of fiction and nonfiction books for children and adults. She pursued a master’s of fine arts degree as part of Simmons’ Children’s Literature: Writing for Children program. Her breakthrough book, This Monstrous Thing, which appeared in 2015, is a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, mixing fantasy, science fiction, and horror. In 2017, Lee published The New York Times bestseller The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue, which follows a bisexual male protagonist from eighteenth-century Europe and debuted Lee’s acclaimed Montague Siblings series. Teen Vogue praised this book as “the queer teen historical you didn’t know was missing from your life,” and the ALA Booklist characterized it as “a gleeful romp through history."

As Lee explained in a 2019 interview with Simmons News, she is particularly drawn to the young adult literary genre: “The books we read as young people are the books that really shape us in crucial times in our lives. They’re the books we carry with us for the rest of our lives.” Most recently, Marvel commissioned Lee to write historical fiction works centered on antiheroes and sympathetic villains. Concerning this Marvel project, the women’s magazine Bustle reported that “with an academic background in history and young adult literature, as well as a penchant for contemporary interpretations of classic stories, Lee seems to be the perfect voice for this anti-hero undertaking.”