Poet Li-Young Lee to present reading

Posted by Jayme Blaschke
University News Service
February 4, 2009

Poet Li-Young Lee, Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University-San Marcos, will present a reading 3:30 p.m. Feb. 5 on the fifth floor of Alkek Library on campus.

Born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, Lee’s great grandfather was China's first republican president, and his father, 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. 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.

Lee is the author of Behind My Eyes (Norton, 2008); Book of My Nights (2001), which won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award; The City in Which I Love You (1991), which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and Rose (1986), which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. His other work includes Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee (Edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, BOA Editions, 2006), a collection of twelve interviews with Lee at various stages of his artistic development; and The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon and Schuster, 1995), a memoir which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.