Sydney Lea is a critic, editor, essayist, novelist, short-story writer, and teacher, but he is best known for his poetry. He has been a past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and a Fulbright Foundation Fellowship; he was also a finalist for a 2001 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. In 1977 Lea founded the New England Review, which he edited for thirteen years. Though the journal has published highly regarded writers such as Robert Penn Warren and Anthony Hecht, it has largely consisted of little-known writers and remains open to unsolicited material. With his poetry Lea has garnered attention for his varied and often relaxed formalism, his narrative style, and his lyrical language. Highly regarded for his use of narrative as well as elegy, Lea typically writes in a commonplace voice about commonplace people.

The oldest of five children, Sydney Longstreth Wright Lea Jr. was born...