Dennis Lee (author)

Dennis Beynon Lee, OC, MA (born August 31, 1939) is a Canadian poet, teacher, editor, and critic born in Toronto, Ontario. He is also a children's writer, well known for his book of children's rhymes, Alligator Pie.

Life

After attending high school at the University of Toronto Schools, Lee received bachelor's and master's degrees in English from the University of Toronto, where he coauthored articles in Acta Victoriana with Margaret Atwood. He taught English at the University's Victoria College from 1963 until 1967, at which time he became 'resource person' for Rochdale College.

Also in 1967, Lee co-founded House of Anansi Press with Dave Godfrey, and served as its editorial director until 1972. From 1974 to 1979 he was a consulting editor for Macmillan of Canada.

He was a writer in residence at Trent University in 1975, and at the University of Toronto in 1978-1979.

Writing

In 1967 House of Anansi published Lee's first book of poetry, Kingdom of Absence, "a sequence of 43 sonnet variations." Lee followed that up the next year with a long meditative poem, Civil Elegies. (Civil Elegies and Other Poems, a revised version of that work collected with some newer poetry, won Lee the Governor General's Award in 1972.)