Lee Romer Kaplan, a civil rights lawyer and actor turned published fiction writer, poet and English professor, spent her early years in Berkeley, California, NYC, and the Middle East, She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from University of California at Berkeley with a BA in History, magna cum laude, and a JD from Berkeley Law, magna cum laude. Lee also earned an MFA from Mills College, where she was awarded the Ardella J. Mills Prize in Graduate Fiction and an Alumni Merit Scholarship. Since completing her MFA, Lee’s writing has secured fellowships and residencies, including at Bread Loaf, Tin House Novel Workshop, Community of Writers, Omnidawn, Sozopol Fiction Seminar, Ragdale, and the Anderson Center, among other honors.

Lee’s love of storytelling and performance took root early. At age eight, she performed on the main stage at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, under the direction of the great Allen Fletcher. As a teenager, she explored transformative arts education as a tool for social change in Haifa and Ramallah, where she taught theater and literary arts as conflict mediation tools in a program for Muslim, Jewish, and Christian youth. As an adolescent and adult, she’s performed, written, and directed shows with theater companies in the US, Israel, and Europe. 

Certified in Amherst Writers & Artists Method (AWA) in 2004, and trained by founder Pat Schneider, Lee has facilitated hundreds of creative writing workshops with writers ages 4 to 94, in venues from homeless shelters to private retreats in the California wine country. She’s also taught writing and literature at institutions including City University of New York, Brooklyn College, Mills College and Solano College, and served as a K-12 teaching artist through Teachers & Writers Collaborative and Brooklyn College Community Partnership in NYC, San Francisco’s Center for the Art of Translation’s Poetry Inside Out program, and Poets in the Schools. 

Past awards include selection as finalist for The Dana Novel Award and The James Jones First Novel Contest, the Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Residency Fellowship at The Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota, the  Elizabeth Kostova Foundation Sozopol Fiction Seminar Fellowship in Sofia and Sozopol, Bulgaria, and Honorable Mention in New Millennium Writings. Past residencies and conference fellowships include Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Tin House Novel Workshop, The Community of Writers, Ragdale Foundation, The Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow, the Julia and David White Colony in Costa Rica, Art Farm, and the Undiscovered Voices Prize from the Writers Center at the University of Maryland. 

Until recently, when she returned for an extended stay in Northern California, Lee lived in New York City, where she taught writing at City University of New York, served on the teaching artist roster at Teachers & Writers Collaborative, and performed.. Her first novel, Tell Me Who I Am, set primarily in Jerusalem during the first Lebanon War, is forthcoming. She’s currently working on her first poetry collection, and a new novel set in dual timelines: Berkeley in the mid-1960s, with young activists in the civil rights and free speech movements, and 1940s Belarus, among the partisan fighters of the Bielski Group.

Recent publications include poems in Tulane Review, and prose at Fiction Writers Review, 100 Word Stories, Postcard Prose & Poems, and flash fiction in the anthology: NOTHING SHORT OF from Outpost19 Books. In 2019, the poet Billy Collins shortlisted one of her poems, “Metamorphosis,” for Ireland’s Fish Poetry Prize, and she attended the Omnidawn Poetry Conference. In 2020, Oliver de la Paz selected several of her poems as finalists for The River Styx International Poetry Prize. In 2023, Lynn Melnick shortlisted Lee’s poetry micro-chapbook, “Locust, Sin & Salt,” for the Jewish Women Poets Prize at Harbor Review.

Lee loves generating creativity and connection, and working with writers of all ages, reflecting back to them the beauty, genius and power she finds in their work. She also loves her rescue Golden Retrievers (if you can, please adopt, don’t shop!), the late great Javi, seen on this site frolicking at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, and new addition Lulu, aka, Princess Puppalulu, pictured in a shy moment peeking out from the fireplace in our Oakland home. For now, Lee lives in the SF Bay Area, and dreams of Brooklyn, her spiritual home.