Sydney Lea is 2021 recipient of his home state Vermont's most prestigious artist's distinction: the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts. A former Pulitzer finalist and winner of the 1998 Poets' Prize, he served as founding editor of New England Review and was Vermont's Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015. He is the author of 23 books, the latest "Seen from All Sides: Lyric and Everyday Life," a compendium of regionally syndicated newspaper columns composed during his tenure as state poet. Recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Fulbright Foundations, for over four decades he taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Middlebury, and Wesleyan colleges. For thirteen of those, he was on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Writing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts too. Lea was also visiting professor at Franklin College in Lugano, Switzerland and Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest. He has long been active in conservation, especially in Maine, where he led two campaigns that conserved over 400,000 acres, 60,000 of which became community forest in one of the state's poorest counties. In 2012, he was named a Hero of Conservation by Field & Stream magazine. He is married with five children and seven grandchildren and lives in Newbury, Vermont.

Lea has been a regular visitor to the Maine woods since he was nine. He is the former president and continuing board member of the Down East Lakes Land Trust and its campaign chair for its two largest campaigns, which have conserved 400,000 acres of woods and waters for traditional public use and also established the largest community forest in the nation. His Washington County off-grid camp has been in his family for four generations and he is intimately familiar with that now all but vanished north country culture.