C. B. Lee is a Chinese-Vietnamese-American author based out of Los Angeles, California.[1] They are the author of young adult fiction, best known for their Sidekick Squad series, which follows a quartet of teenagers in a near future world of superheroes and supervillains.
Lee's parents are immigrants from Vietnam and China.[2] Lee is openly bisexual[3] and also open about their struggles with mental illness.[4] They have been featured in Teen Vogue, Hypable, and Wired Magazine for their novels.[5] Lee is represented by Thao Le of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.[5]
Their debut young adult novel, Seven Tears at High Tide, about a boy who gets rescued and falls for a selkie, was published by Duet Books in 2015. It won the 2016 Rainbow Award for Bisexual Fantasy & Fantasy Romance in 2016[6] and was a finalist for the 2016 Bisexual Book Award in the category Young Adult and Speculative Fiction.[7]
The first book in the Sidekick Squad series, Not Your Sidekick, was published by Duet Books in 2016.[8] It tells the story of Jess, a bisexual teen without superpowers living in a world where superpowers are normal, who has to compete with her town's infamous supervillain for her dream internship and deal with her crush on her friend Abby.[9][10]Not Your Sidekick was a finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award in the category LGBTQ Children's/Young Adult[11] and a finalist for the 2017 Bisexual Book Award in Speculative Fiction.[7] The second book, Not Your Villain, following the protagonists from the first novel who have now joined a resistance movement, was published by Duet Books in 2017.[12] A third book, Not Your Backup, was published in 2019. Lee cites the X-Men and wanting to write a story incorporating identity and alienation as inspiration for writing the series.[13]
Lee also contributed a short story to Saundra Mitchell's Out Now: Queer We Go Again!, published by Inkyard Press in 2020.[14]