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Poetry Reading by Li-Young Lee

Presented by Saint Mary's College at Saint Mary's College, Haggar Parlor

April 13, 2007

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"He dares to be simple. And he is surely among the finest young poets alive," says The American Poetry Review of Li-Young Lee. Anyone who has seen him read will add that Lee is also one of the finest poetry readers alive. He is deeply spiritual, but he is also very human and open to his listeners. Li-Young Lee's most recent book of poetry, Book of My Nights (BOA Editions, 2001), is his third. 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. Li-Young Lee was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, of Chinese parents. Li-Young Lee's great grandfather, Yuan Shikai, was China's first republican president (1912-16) and Lee's father, Lee Kuo Yuan, a deeply religious Christian, 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, where he helped found Gamaliel University. In 1959, his father, after spending a year as a political prisoner in President Sukarno's jails, 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.