UNH Hosts Award-Winning Poet Nov. 10
 
By Erika Mantz, Media Relations

Poet Li-Young Lee will read from his work Thursday, Nov. 10, at 5 p.m. in Murkland Hall, room 115, as part of the UNH English Department’s Writers Series, in conjunction with the Parents Association. The reading is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase and signing.

Li-Young Lee was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, of Chinese parents. His father, who was a personal physician to Mao Zedong while in China, relocated the family to Indonesia, where he helped found Gamaliel University. In 1959 the family fled the country to escape anti-Chinese sentiment and after a five-year trek through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, they settled in the U.S. in 1964.

Li-Young Lee attended the Universities of Pittsburgh and Arizona, and the State University of New York at Brockport. He has taught at several universities, including Northwestern and the University of Iowa. He is the author of Book of My Nights; The City in Which I Love You, which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and Rose, which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award; as well as a memoir titled The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. His other honors include a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writer's Award, grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.

The Writers Series will continue in the spring semester of 2006 with readings by fiction writer Russell Banks on March 28 and poet Billy Collins on April 24. For more information, call 2-1313.