Li-Young Lee to Read in Jean Burden Poetry Series, March 6, 2014
American poet Li-Young Lee will read from his works at the 2014 Jean Burden Poetry Reading to be held on March 6, 2014. This event will be held in the Golden Eagle Ballroom at the California State University, Los Angeles. Doors will open at 5:45pm for a buffet reception and the program will begin at 6:30pm. This event is free and open to the public.There will be book sales and signing following the reading.
This event is made possible by the College of Arts and
Letters, the Department of English, the CSULA Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, and Statement Magazine.
For information on parking, please visit CSULA Campus Maps. For more information, contact the Department of English at (323) 343-4140.
About Li-Young Lee
Li-Young Lee is the author of four critically acclaimed books of poetry, his most recent being Behind My Eyes (W.W. Norton, 2008). In the foreword to Lee's first collection, Gerald Stern wrote that Lee's poetry was characterized by "certain humility…a willingness to let the sublime enter his field of concentration and take over, a devotion to language, a belief in its holiness."
Others have agreed. Lee's first volume of poetry, Rose (BOA, 1986) was awarded the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University, and his second volume, The City in Which I Love You (BOA, 1991), was a Lamont Poetry Selection. His memoir, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon and Schuster, 1995), received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and has been republished in a new edition (BOA, 2013). 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.
The elemental spareness of Lee's poetry belies his family's tumultuous history. Caught up in the post-WWII Asian diaspora, Lee's family, prominent in modern Chinese history, had escaped into exile in Indonesia where he was born in 1957. After his birth and the year-long detention of his father as a political prisoner, the family was forced to flee anti-Chinese sentiment and began a five-year journey that took them to Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, before they finally settled in the United States in 1964. Lee did not become interested in writing poetry until he was a student at the University of Pittsburgh. He later attended the University of Arizona, and the State University of New York at Brockport, which in 1998 awarded him the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.
To learn more about Li-Young Lee and his poetry, visit the following sites: