Li-Young Lee.

Timed with National Poetry Month, this year's Joshua Ringel Memorial Lecture co-sponsored by Johns Hopkins' Center for Talented Youth presents Li-Young Lee reading from his work, on Thursday, April 15, at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Lee, the son of the personal physician to Mao Zedong, was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, and spent his first years moving among Asian countries, sometimes under persecution, before emigrating to America in 1964. He is the author of Book of My Nights (2001), The City in Which I Love You (1991), Rose (1986), which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award, and a memoir titled The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (1995).

"What characterizes Lee's writing," writes poet Gerald Stern, "is a certain humility, a kind of cunning, a love of plain speech ... a willingness to let the sublime enter the field of his concentration ... a pursuit of certain Chinese ideas, or Chinese memories, without any self-conscious ethnocentricity, and a moving personal search for redemption."

Co-sponsors for the event, along with CTY, are the Gilman School, Baltimore, and the Teachers and Writers Collaborative, New York City.

A reception with light fare starting at 5:45 p.m. precedes the reading at 6:30 p.m. For more information, call 410-516-0186.

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