Lee Mallory (poet)

In August 2017, Mallory performed with blues rock musician Lisa Mac at the “Love Wins Again Benefit Show,” a fundraiser for Opportunity Village, a nonprofit organization that services people with intellectual disabilities.

In 2012, he retired from teaching 32 years at Santa Ana College, and moved in 2013 to Las Vegas. He has performed poetry in a variety of Las Vegas venues, including casinos, bars, coffee houses and libraries, which Mallory described to the southern Nevada NPR affiliate, KNPR News, as taking his performance poetry to the streets.

Mallory and his former wife had two daughters, Natalee and Misty, the latter of whom was a fellow poet who committed suicide in 1999. She'd had an onset of mental illness and had difficulty coping with life on medication. She left a note that said she hoped her family would understand. Before her death, she was notified that a Laguna Beach publishing house would be releasing her first book of free-verse poems, which was published posthumously and edited by her father. The tragedy fueled Mallory's writing in part, he told the Los Angeles Times, because "Poetry endures." Misty's death also prompted her sister Natalee to write a suicide prevention grant for her master's dissertation at California State University, Long Beach on behalf of the Jacqueline Bogue Foundation in Orange County.

In 1998, Mallory was given a Distinguished Faculty Lecturer award from Santa Ana College. The college also gave him a Professional Achievement award in 1990. In 1992, 1998, 2006 and 2010, he was given Publications awards.

Mallory rose to prominence with a book of poems in a limited first edition titled I Write Your Name, which was released in 1990 by Prometheus Press. It was followed by Full Moon, Empty Hands in 1994. Critics have dubbed Mallory the "love poet" and Newport Beach's "unofficial Poet Laureate."

In 1980, he was hired as a full-time professor by Santa Ana College, teaching English as a second language. In the late 1980s until 2012, he co-produced monthly poetry readings in Orange County.

In 1969, he obtained his bachelor's degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he became acquainted with poet Kenneth Rexroth. While at UC Santa Barbara, Mallory also became friends with the late poet Charles Bukowski. From 1970-'71, he attended graduate school, and taught English at the University of Bordeaux in France. He served three years in the U.S. Army, and afterward returned to Newport Beach and college and graduated with a master's degree in 1978 from California State University, Long Beach.

Growing up, Mallory lived for a time in Lebanon and Italy, as his father and stepfather were pilots and the family moved often, eventually settling in Newport Beach, California, when Mallory was a teenager. In 1964, he graduated from Newport Harbor High School.

Lee Mallory (born March 16, 1946 in San Mateo, California) is an American poet, editor and academic best known for hosting and performing monthly poetry readings in Orange County, California, for more than 20 years.