October 15

"Like a pairing of Walt Whitman with the great Tang dynasty poet Tu Fu, LI-YOUNG LEE emerges as an audacious and passionate poet-traveler. In the manner of Tang poetry, he speaks colloquially but metaphysically; he meditates, but always allows the noises of the world to enter" (Carole Muske, New York Times Book Review).

Li-Young Lee was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, of Chinese parents. In China, his father served as personal physician to Mao Tse-Tung; in Indonesia he became a political prisoner of Sukarno. The family traveled to Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, before settling in America. Lee's first collection of poetry, Rose (Boa Editions), was published in 1986 and won the Delmore Schwartz Award for the best first collection of that year. His second book, The City in Which I Love You, was the 1990 Lamont selection from the Academy of American Poets. He was featured in Bill Moyers' "Power of the World" series on PBS. Of his autobiography, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon and Schuster,1995), Edward Hirsch wrote, "The Winged Seed is …a work that magically breaks a legacy of silence to excavate and exorcise the past, to understand its sufferings and divine its meanings. It has true spiritual importance for contemporary American literature."