Acclaimed poet Lee is English Department's 2013 writer in residence

            Award-winning poet Li-Young Lee will be a writer in residence on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus from Feb. 18 to March 1. He will give a public reading at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 27 in the Great Plains Art Museum, 1155 Q St., with a reception and book signing to follow. The reading is free and open to the public.

            Lee is the author of "Behind My Eyes; Book of My Nights," which won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award; "The City in Which I Love You," which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and "Rose," which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. He has been the recipient of an Academy of American Poets fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, among many other awards.

            His background is not of the ordinary. He was born in Indonesia in 1957 to political exiles from China, where his father had been a personal physician to Mao Zedong and his great grandfather had been the first president of the Republic of China. When Lee was 2, his family fled Indonesia to escape anti-Chinese sentiment and after five years of roving from Hong Kong to Macau to Japan, it immigrated to the United States and settled in Seattle. The family later moved to Pennsylvania, where Lee attended the University of Pittsburgh. He also attended the University of Arizona and the State University of New York at Brockport. He has taught at several universities, including Northwestern and Iowa, and lives in Chicago.

            In addition to the UNL Department of English and Creative Writing Program, Lee's visit is hosted by the Office of the Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs.

Writer: Claire Harlan-Orsi