A Place in Mind

Sydney Lea is 2021 recipient of the Vermont Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts. A former Pulitzer finalist and winner of the 1998 Poets' Prize, he served as founding editor of New England Review andwas Vermont's poet laureate from 2011 to 2015. The author of 23 books, Lea is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Fulbright Foundations, and for more than four decades he taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Middlebury, and Wesleyan colleges and was, for thirteen of those, on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Writing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He has long been active in conservation, especially in Maine, where he led two campaigns that conserved over 400,000 acres, 60,000 of which became community forest in one of the state's poorest counties. In 2012, he was named a Hero of Conservation by Field & Stream magazine. He is married with five children and seven grandchildren and lives in Newbury, Vermont.