Li-Young Lee – författare

"It has true spiritual importance for contemporary American literature."—Edward Hirsch

Upon its initial publication, acclaimed poet Li-Young Lee''s memoir The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (1995), received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. In lyrical prose, Lee''s extraordinary story begins in the 1950s when his parents fled China''s political turmoil for Indonesia. Along with many other Chinese members of the population, his family was persecuted under President Sukarno. Falsely accused and charged for crimes against the state, his father spent a year and a half in jail as a political prisoner, half of that time in a leper colony. While his entire family was being transported to a prison colony, they escaped and fled to Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, and back to Hong Kong where his father rose to prominence as an evangelical preacher. Eventually, the family sought asylum in the United States in 1962. When the author was six, they emigrated to a small town in western Pennsylvania where his father became a Presbyterian minister. This reissued edition contains a new foreword by the author and never-before-seen photos of the family from different stages of their journey.

Li-Young Lee is the author of four critically acclaimed books of poetry that have garnered such awards as the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University; the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; the Writer''s Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation; and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Book of My Nights is the first poetry collection in ten years by one of the world''s most acclaimed young poets. In Book of My Nights, Li-Young Lee once again gives us lyrical poetry that fuses memory, family, culture and history. In language as simple and powerful as the human muscle, these poems work individually and as a full-sequence meditation on the vulnerability of humanity.

Marketing Plans: o National advertising o National media campaign o National and regional author appearances o Advance reader copies o Course adoption mailing

Li-Young Lee burst onto the American literary scene with the publication of Rose, winner of the 1986 Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award from The Poetry Society of America. He followed that astonishing book with The City in Which I Love You, which was The Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets. Mr. Lee has appeared on National Public Radio a number of times and The Power of the Word, the PBS television series with Bill Moyers. Rose and The City in Which I Love You are in the 19th and 17th printings respectively, making them two of the highest-selling contemporary poetry books in the United States. Moreover, Mr. Lee''s poems have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He currently lives in Chicago.

In the foreword to Li-Young Lee’s first book, Rose (BOA Editions, 1986), Gerald Stern wrote, “What characterizes Li-Young Lee’s poetry is a certain kind of humility, a kind of cunning, a love of plain speech, a search for wisdom and understanding. . . . I think we are in the presence of a true spirit.” Poetry lovers agree! Rose has gone on to sell more than eighty thousand copies, and Li-Young Lee has become one of the country’s most beloved poets.

Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee is a collection of the best dozen interviews given by Li-Young Lee over the past twenty years. From a twenty-nine-year-old poet prodigy to a seasoned veteran in high demand for readings and appearances across the United States and abroad, these interviews capture Li-Young Lee at various stages of his artistic development. He not only discusses his family’s flight from political oppression in China and Indonesia, but how that journey affected his poetry and the engaging, often painful, insights being raised a cultural outsider in America afforded him. Other topics include spirituality (primarily Christianity and Buddhism) and a wide range of aesthetic topics such as literary influences, his own writing practices, the role of formal and informal education in becoming a writer, and his current life as a famous and highly sought-after American poet.