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Li-Young Lee |
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Li-Young
Lee’s most recent book of poetry is Book of
My Nights (BOA Editions). His earlier works are
Rose (BOA, 1986), winner of the Delmore Schwartz
Memorial Award from New York University, The City
in Which I Love You (1991), the 1990 Lamont Poetry
Selection; and a memoir entitled The Winged Seed:
A Remembrance (Simon and Schuster, 1995), which
received an American Book Award from the Before
Columbus Foundation. Lee’s honors include
fellowships from the National Endowment for the
Arts, The Lannan Foundation, and the John Simon
Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as grants
from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth
of Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania Council on
the Arts. In 1988, he received the Writer’s
Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. He
lives in Chicago, Illinois, with his wife, Donna,
and their two sons.
Mr. Lee was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia,
of Chinese parents. His great grandfather, Yuan
Shikai, was China’s first republican president
(1912-16) and Lee’s father, Lee Kuo Yuan,
was physician to Communist leader Mao Tse-Tung.
After the establishment of the People’s Republic
of China in 1949, Lee’s parents escaped to
Indonesia; there, his father helped found Gamaliel
University. In 1959, after spending a year as a
political prisoner in President Sukarno’s
jails, Lee’s father fled Indonesia with his
family to escape anti-Chinese sentiment. After a
five-year trek through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan,
they settled in the United States in 1964.
Program: Around the World in 3 Poets
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