A master narrative poet, Lea's previous poetry volumes include Prayer for the Little City, No Sign, The Floating Candles and Searching the Drowned Man. His seventh verse collection will be Pursuit of a Wound. His only novel, A Place in Mind, was first published in 1989 and in paperback in 1997. Lea was the founder and long-time editor of The New England Review. He is the past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry, and of a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. A Vermont native, Lea is also the author of numerous essays and magazine pieces on morally responsible hunting and dog-training, some of which are collected in Hunting the Whole Way Home.

The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times and the major literary quarterlies print his poems and essays somewhat regularly. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. As a fellow for the Fulbright Foundation, Lea visited the Hungarian National University in Budapest in 1992.

Lea founded and for thirteen years edited the New England Review. He holds BA, MA and PhD degrees from Yale University. He has taught at Yale, Wesleyan, and Middlebury College. Currently he teaches at both Dartmouth and the MFA program at Vermont College. He has five children and lives with them and his wife, a lawyer and the director of small claims mediation for Caledonia County, in Newbury, Vermont.