Background
David Dodd Lee is the author of eleven full-length books of poems & a chapbook, including, in chronological order, Downsides of Fish Culture (New Issues Press, 1997), Arrow Pointing North (Four Way Books, 2002), Abrupt Rural (New Issues Press, 2004), Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere, the Ashbery Erasure Poems (BlaxeVox, 2010), The Nervous Filaments (Four Way Books, 2010) Orphan, Indiana (University of Akron Press, 2010), The Coldest Winter On Earth (Marick Press, 2012), Animalities (Four Way Books, 2014), And Others, Vaguer Presences (a second book of Ashbery erasure poems, which appeared in 2018, also published by BlazeVox), & Unlucky Animals, which includes 60 pages of original poems, Ashbery erasure poems, dictionary sonnets, & over sixty collages. He has published fiction in many literary magazines, & is currently making final edits on a novel entitled Flood. His poetry has appeared on Verse Daily, as part of the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project, in The Nation, The Chattahoochee Review, Nerve, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, Jacket, Verse, Diagram, Guernica, Conduit, Marlboro Review, Perihelion, POOL, Laurel Review, Prairie Schooner, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Barrow Street, Best of the Net 2006 (Sundress Publications), Caffeine Destiny, Massachusetts Review, Washington Square, Slope, Quarterly West, Many Mountains Moving, Natural Bridge, Field, Phoebe, Sycamore Review, Cutbank, etc. Fiction has appeared in Green Mountains Review, Crowd, Sou’wester, Controlled Burn, & West Branch. He is also a collage artist, painter, & a photographer (see artwork at http://seventeenfingeredpoetrybird.blogspot.com). His visual art has been featured in three one-person exhibitions, including, in 2014, All You Need is an Allen Wrench, a series of collages & mixed-media works that also include poetry texts, often with work excerpted from Orphan, Indiana. His artwork has also appeared online at Pinball, Tupelo Quarterly, The Hunger, Twyckenham Notes, & his illustration work regularly appears in The Rumpus. In 2016 he began making sculpture, most of which he installed on various public lands, surreptitiously. As an editor Lee has published two fiction & poetry anthologies (Shade, 2004 & Shade, 2006), & a selected poems of Herbert Scott, The Other Life (Carnegie Mellon, 2010). He was also the editor of, together with Donna Munro, Half Moon Bay poetry chapbooks, which published titles by Franz Wright & Hugh Seidman, among others. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press, whose recent titles include poetry books by Allan Peterson, Carrie Oeding, William Stobb, Tracey Knapp, Betsy Andrews & Mary Ann Samyn. In the past he was poetry editor at Third Coast & Passages North as well. Lee took an undergraduate degree in painting & art history & received his MFA degree from Western Michigan University. He is currently a Professor of Creative Writing at Indiana University South Bend, where he teaches classes on poetry, fiction, publishing & editing, as well as visual art. He lives on the St. Joseph River in northern Indiana, where he fishes, kayaks & tries to make art, in one form or another, as frequently as possible.