Lillian Vallee was born in Hamburg, Germany, to Polish parents displaced by World War II.  She grew up in Detroit, Michigan, but has spent most of her adult life in California, the last sixteen years in California's Central Valley.        

Lillian has degrees in English Literature and Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley, and is an award-winning translator of literature from the Polish.  She is currently completing work on a dissertation entitled Bear with a Cross: The Primordial Tradition in the Work of Czeslaw Milosz.

As an instructor at Modesto Junior College, Lillian enjoys teaching all levels of composition courses as well as poetry writing and critical thinking.  Her great loves are the literature and natural history of the Great Central Valley, and her courses often have an interdisciplinary and "regional" flavor.  Her Central Valley literary favorites include Ernest Finney's Words of My Roaring, Thomas Jefferson Mayfield's Indian Summer, the murder mysteries of Rebecca Rothenberg, and the poetry of Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, Jean Janzen, and Robert Mezey.

Lillian has published over 130 translations, articles, reviews, and poems, and has given more than 70 public talks and lectures.  She is one of the featured poets in Highway 99, A Literary Journey through California's Great Central Valley, and the author of three chapbooks--Vision at Orestimba, Erratics, and handful of snow, which are tributes to the natural and cultural heritage of the Central Valley and to her own upbringing as the daughter of Polish immigrants.