Joel Agee is the author of two memoirs, Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2000), and In The House Of My Fear (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006). His essays have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, and other magazines. His translation of Heinrich von Kleist's Penthesilea and Hans Erich Nossack's Der Untergang won the 1999 Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize and the 2005 Lois Roth Prize of the Modern Language Association, respectively. In 2007 he was a finalist for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and received the Alta National Translation for his translation of the Selected Writings of Friedrich Dürrenmatt. He has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.