About Lee
Poet, Editor, Educator, Consultant, Arts Non-Profit Innovator
Lee Briccetti received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry, as well as a poetry fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has been awarded residencies at MacDowell, Millay Arts, and the American Academy in Rome. Her most recent volume of poems is Blue Guide (2018), preceded by Day Mark (2005), both published by Four Way Books.
Learn more about Lee's books and other publications.
Briccetti was the long-time Executive Director of Poets House, a national poetry library in New York City, from 1989 to 2021. Her leadership of the organization for over 32 years built it into one of the premier literary centers in the United States and one of the great poetry libraries in the world. She brought Poets House from a home-economics room in a high school to a magnificent space created just for the art of poetry.
In the early 2000s, Briccetti oversaw the $11M capital project that led to a permanent home for Poets House. She invented the Poets House Showcase, which since 1992 has gathered all the year's poetry books in one place, building the library into one of the most comprehensive records of poetry-in-print. She established Poetry in The Branches, a program that mentored scores of public library systems around the country to assist them in creating centers for the discovery of poetry, and ultimately aligning them with zoos and natural history museums for programs that explored poetry and the sciences.
Lee Briccetti was crucial in transforming the vision of Elizabeth Kray and Stanley Kunitz into a real place: a place for poetry.
Welcoming, diverse, and expansive in scope, Poets House became a library, a reading and writing room, a gathering place that, in its programs and under Lee's leadership, reached deep and wide into the city and into the world of poetry and invited EVERYONE in. No place like it – Lee did that. ”
— Marie Howe
