Lee Briccetti is a poet and has been the long-time executive director of Poets House. Born in Italy and raised in the U.S., her writing explores issues of place, the natural world, and community-building for justice. Her first book, Day Mark, was published by Four Way Books in 2005. She has also written Blue Guide. She has won a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry and a Poetry Fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She was educated at Sarah Lawrence College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Briccetti’s essays have appeared in Blueprints: Bringing Poetry into Communities, ed. Katharine Coles (The Poetry Foundation) as well as This-World Company: Collected Essays on the Work of Jean Valentine, ed. Kazim Ali and John Hoppenthaler (Michigan University Press). Many essays and introductions have also appeared in Poets House publications, including The Language of Conservation, a compilation of essays on language’s relationship to the environment and Essays on the Occasion of Illuminated Verses: Poetries of the Islamic World. In 2014, Poetic Species: A Conversation Between E.O. Wilson and Robert Hass was framed by her introductory notes and published by Bellevue Literary Press. She has extensive public speaking experience and has taught at New York University. Her leadership of Poets House has built it into one of the premiere literary centers in the United States and one of the great poetry libraries in the world. She created The Poets House Showcase, which gathers all of the year’s new books of poetry in one place. She established Poetry in The Branches, which has mentored scores of public library systems, helping them to become centers for the discovery of poetry in their own communities. She led the building of a permanent home for Poets House to which the organization moved in 2009. Now in Lower Manhattan, 80,000 people cross the Poets House threshold annually, millions more experience poetry through the organization’s online presence or national programs in partner libraries and cultural institutions.
Portrait by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
