Vermont College of Fine Arts

The Vermont Arts Council announced today that Governor Peter Shumlin has appointed Sydney Lea as Vermont’s next Poet Laureate. Syd Lea has had a long association with Vermont College of Fine Arts, first as a member of the MFA in Writing Program faculty from 1989-2002 and then as a founding member of the VCFA Board of Trustees.

Syd Lea has been described as “a man in the woods with his head full of books, and a man in books with his head full of woods.” Renowned as a prose writer as well as poet, he has also published a novel and two books of essays that combine the precision of an active naturalist and ecologist with the erudition of a multilingual professor of literature. His stories, poems, essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Gray’s Sporting Journal, and many other periodicals, as well as in more than forty anthologies. Lea co-founded the literary quarterly New England Review in 1977, oversaw its move to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference at Middlebury College, and edited this esteemed journal until 1989. His poetry collections have earned special critical acclaim, with Pursuit of a Wound, (2000) named one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. His preceding volume, To the Bone: New and Selected Poems, was co-winner of the 1998 Poets’ Prize, one of the nation’s highest honors for a single collection of poems.

A public ceremony honoring Mr. Lea will be held on Nov. 4 at the Capital Plaza Hotel in Montpelier. The ceremony will be attended by Gov. Shumlin as part of an evening celebrating the arts in Vermont.

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