Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) was born in Rockland, Maine, and began to write poetry at an early age. In 1912, her poem "Renascence" was published in a collection called The Lyric Year. After attending Barnard and Vassar, she published a book of verse, Renascence and Other Poems, and moved to Greenwich Village in New York City. There she refined her poetic talents and worked as both an actor and playwright for the Provincetown Players, which produced her plays The Princess Marries the Page, Aria da Capo, and Two Slatterns and a King. Millay became a master of the sonnet, one of the most difficult of English poetic forms, and her poetry reached a large and enthusiastic audience. In 1923, she received a Pulitzer Prize for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver. In that same year she married and bought a farm in upstate New York, where she continued her writing, including a sonnet cycle, or group of related sonnets, called Fatal Interview. Many of her later works dealt with social and political issues. Works by Millay include Collected Sonnets (1941), Collected Lyrics (1943), and Collected Poems (1953).
Li-Young Lee (1957– ) was born in Jakarta, Indonesia. Because his parents had been forced to flee China, Lee wandered through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan with his family before finally settling in the United States. Of this experience, Lee has said, "I feel as if [my family's] experience may be no more than an outward manifestation of a homelessness that people in general feel."
Lee earned his B.A. at the University of Pittsburgh and has taught at various schools. Marked by celebration, intimacy, passion, and sadness, Lee's poetry often draws on stories, many about his father, who was a professor before becoming a Presbyterian minister. Lee now has young children of his own and says, "I tell them stories constantly, and they love to hear stories."
Lee's writing includes his poetry collections Rose (1986) and The City in Which I Love You (1990), as well as his memoir The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (1995), which chronicles his family's journeys. His work has been honored with numerous prizes and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets.