Award-winning poet to read from ‘The Winged Seed’ and more

Li-Young Lee to present annual Jean Burden reading at Cal State L.A.

Award-winning poet Li-Young Lee will present this year’s Jean Burden Poetry Reading at Cal State L.A. on Thursday, March 6, 6:30 p.m., in Cal State L.A.’s Golden Eagle Ballroom. Doors will open at 5:45 p.m. for buffet reception and seating.

Lee will read from his 2013 edition of The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, and other selections from his collection of poetry. Admission to the event is free. There will be a book sale and signing after the reading.

“It is a rare event for Li-Young Lee to appear in Los Angeles, and a special treat for local audiences to attend a reading by a beloved and widely taught poet whose words resonate with readers nationally and internationally,” said Cal State L.A.’s English Professor Lauri Ramey, who is also director of the University’s Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics.

Lee is the author of four critically acclaimed books of poetry; his most recent being Behind My Eyes (W.W. Norton, 2008). Lee’s first volume of poetry, Rose (1986), was awarded the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University, and his second volume, The City in Which I Love You (1991), was a Lamont Poetry Selection. His memoir, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (1995)—now reissued in a new edition—received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.

Lee’s honors also 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.

He attended the Universities of Pittsburgh and Arizona, and the State University of New York at Brockport, which in 1998 awarded him the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.

For more about Lee, go to http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/li-young-lee or http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/291.

This event is sponsored by the Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Department of English, and College of Arts and Letters at CSULA. It is also co-sponsored by W.W. Norton and Co. and Statement Magazine.

The University is located at the Eastern Avenue exit, San Bernardino Freeway, at the interchange of the 10 and 710 Freeways. Public (permit dispensers) parking is available on the top level of Parking Structure C. For more on the poetry reading, call the Cal State L.A. English Department at (323) 343-4140.

Jean Burden Annual Poetry Series

This series, one of the longest running and most prestigious in the U.S., was established in 1986 by friends of the late Jean Burden to honor her achievements as a poet, essayist, editor, teacher and scholar. An Illinois native, University of Chicago alumna, and Altadena resident, Burden served as poetry editor of Yankee Magazine for 47 years, and published two collections of poetry, a volume of essays on poetry, and six books on animal welfare. Sustained by a generous bequest from Virginia E. Smith, the Jean Burden Series has featured such guest readers as Lucille Clifton, Victor Hernández Cruz, Rita Dove, Anthony Hecht, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Galway Kinnell, Carolyn Kizer, Maxine Kumin, Andrew Motion, Harryette Mullen, Mary Oliver, Linda Pastan, Adrienne Rich, Mark Strand, and Richard Wilbur.