Sydney Lea,
Author, Professor, Editor, Poet, Writer & Vermont Resident

Sydney Lea is a nature enthusiast. For A Place in Mind, Lea brings his poetic talent to a novel set in the woods of Maine. Hunting the Whole Way Home is a collection of his naturalist essays.

Lea is an internationally respected poet. To The Bone, his most recent poetry collection, won the Poet's Prize in 1998. The Poet's Prize is juried by twenty established contemporary poets, all of whom contribute toward a generous cash honorarium. Lea feels blessed to have won this award as it carries with it the good opinion of his peers. Lea has five other collections of poetry, and a seventh, Pursuit of a Wound, due out in September.

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.

"'In a series of lyrical, stunningly crafted flashbacks, Brant Healy recalls barroom brawls, lusty affairs, travels to France and a crucial friendship, all over a span of 40-odd years." --New York Times Book Review

"A Place in Mind is a thoughtful, uplifting examination of a lifelong friendship and a tribute to the human spirit. It celebrates the beauty of rivers, lakes, and woods in an era before pollution and ecological disaster." --Library JournaI

"This is a novel for which the words haunting and elegiac are correct but sadly inadequate." --Outside

"Lea is able to weave a rich web, full of country anecdotes, real Maine speech, and vivid portraits of bird shooting and deer hunting and Brant's one all-too-believable tragic love affair. And, above all, fishing. Maybe this really is a fly-fishing book, at least in a way, say, A River Runs Through It is..." --Gray's Sporting Journal