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In 1974, Lee Sharkey bought a hundred-year-old Pearl platen press, taught herself to set type and print, and produced over the course of a long Maine winter her first poetry chapbook. Over the next four years, under the imprint South Solon Press, she produced two more chapbooks of her own poetry, portfolios of other poets’ work, and ephemera such as poems on paper lunch bags.

Since then, she has continued to work both on and off the grid as a writer, teacher, and editor. Her publications include six chapbooks and three full-length volumes, A Darker, Sweeter String (Off the Grid Press, 2008); To A Vanished World (Puckerbrush, 1995), a poem sequence in response to Roman Vishniac’s photographs of Eastern European Jewry in the years just preceding the Nazi Holocaust; and Farmwife (Puckerbrush Press, 1977). Calendars of Fire is forthcoming from Tupelo Press.

Lee is the recipient of the 2010 Maine Arts Commission's Individual Artist Fellowship in Literary Arts and the 1997 Rainmaker Award in Poetry, judged by Carolyn Forché. Her poems have appeared in Ancora Imparo, Cerise Press, Drunken Boat, Green Mountains Review, Nimrod, The Pinch, Prairie Schooner, and Seattle Review, among other journals. Since 2003 she has co-edited the Beloit Poetry Journal, one of the country’s oldest and most respected poetry journals.