Sydney Lea

Profile

Sydney Lea (Emeritus) (Newbury, VT) is the former Poet Laureate of Vermont. His most recent collection of poems, I Was Thinking of Beauty, is available from Four Way Books, and in 2013 his collaborative book with former Delaware poet laureate Fleda Brown, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives, was published in e-book format by Autumn House.

His twelfth poetry volume, No Doubt the Nameless, will appear from Four Way Books in the spring, and his fourth collection of lyrical essays, What’s the Story? Short Takes on a Life Grown Long, will be published by Vermont’s Green Writers Press in the fall. Syd founded New England Review in 1977 and edited it until 1989. One of his previous poetry collections, Pursuit of a Wound (2000), was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. He has received fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright and Guggenheim Foundations and has taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, Vermont and Middlebury colleges, as well as at Franklin College in Switzerland and the National Hungarian University in Budapest. His stories, poems, essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated and many other periodicals, as well as in more than 40 anthologies.