Li-Young Lee was born in Djakarta in 1957, and is the son of Chinese political exiles. In Djakarta, his father helped found Gamaliel University but as anti-Chinese sentiment grew he was arrested and held as a political prisoner for a year. After that, the family fled through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, arriving in Seattle in 1964 before moving to Pennsylvania, where Lee's father attended seminary and became a Presbyterian minister. At about the same time, Lee attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he studied with Gerald Stern and started writing poetry for the first time.
Lee's poetry has two poles, one mystic and the other completely engaged in life, hunger, experience, and memory. He believes in the totality of causes and the Cosmos. He writes about faith and war, and has often said that he considers every poem to be "a descendent of God… the 'Me' talking about 'Me'--that's not enough."
Today Lee is the author of four published books of poetry, including his debut Rose (BOA Editions), and The City in Which I Love You (BOA Editions), which won the prestigious Lamont Poetry Selection (now the Laughlin Award), and features a beautiful love poem set in Chicago, where he lives now with his family. He is also the author of an autobiography, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon and Schuster) and featured in Breaking the Alabaster Jar, a book of essays edited by Earl G. Ingersoll (BOA Editions). In 2011 Lee's poem "The City In Which I Love You" was translated, with his blessing, into an expanded cinema project directed by Christy LeMaster and Joshua Dumas, and performed at the Nightingale Cinema in Noble Square for two sold-out nights.