About
Mary Dean Lee began publishing poems in American and Canadian journals in 2019 and was selected for Best Canadian Poetry 2021. Her recent work appears in Ploughshares, The Fiddlehead, Burningword, Dunes Review, Salvation South and Hamilton Stone Review. Pine Row Press has published her debut poetry collection, Tidal, released Spring 2024. She lives with her husband in Montreal.
It is no wonder that place is such a living character in Mary Dean’s poetry. She grew up in Milledgeville, Georgia, spending summers with grandparents in St. Simons Island, Georgia and the Blue Ridge mountains near Asheville, North Carolina. She studied political science at Duke University, and literature and theatre at Eckerd College, finishing her final year with a solo piano recital, production and direction of two one-act plays, and her thesis “Dance as Art vs. Self-Expression.” She also represented the city of St. Petersburg, Florida in a Sister City Exchange program with Takamatsu, Japan, where she spent a year teaching English in a Japanese high school and making public appearances and speeches to promote international relations. She settled in Philadelphia after returning home and worked as a teacher several years before pursuing graduate study in educational and organizational psychology at Temple University and the University of South Florida. She completed a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior at Yale with a thesis titled “The Design of Individual Life Space.”
After a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard Business School, Mary Dean moved to Montreal for a job as an Assistant Professor in the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, where she moved up over the years to Associate and Full Professor. She received multiple, large research grants from Canadian government sources and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to pursue cutting-edge research on women and work, alternative work arrangements, and the changing nature of retirement. McGill recognized her as the most cited professor in the media in 1999, with coverage by over 70 different media, including CBC Radio and Television, NBC Nightly News, CTV National News, Financial Times, and Los Angeles Times. She published scientific articles in a range of academic outlets, as well as Harvard Business Review and Psychology Today.
Photo by Rainey Gregg Photography LLC.
About Mary Dean Lee
Flowing near the Okefenokee, soothed by train whistles,
tracks rattling beside miles of slash pine.
Raised with cousins, summers on barrier islands,
conch harvesting, riding waves, and the tides
stirred by pounding and flashes in the sky.
A wicked arm-wrestler, torch singer, believer
in changing the world. Wound up in Montreal.
Professor, researcher, complainer.
I should tell you about being a mother,
because it’s important to who I am and to
my poetry. But I will say nothing.
I fly a scarlet kite with yellow tail-feathers in high
winds, not afraid if it lifts me off to Timbuktu.
I ride my bike to the market for beans and corn,
oak-leaf lettuce, acorn squash, Quebec straws and blues.
There’s a little bell on one of the handlebars that I have never rung.
Mary Dean Lee 