Sydney Lea is 2021 recipient of the Vermont 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. The author of 23 books, Lea is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Fulbright Foundations, and for more than four decades he taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Middlebury, and Wesleyan colleges. He has long been active in conservation, especially in Maine, where he led two campaigns that conserved over 400,000 acres. He lives in Newbury, Vermont.