Biography
Wayne Schlepp was born in 1931 in South Dakota in a small town on the prairies where the open spaces in which he grew up left him with a special character for which he has been most grateful all his life. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War and having been sent to the Army Language School where he was enrolled in their Chinese course which lasted a full year, he spent the rest of his enlistment in an intelligence unit in Tokyo. After leaving the army, he was given a scholarship to a university of his choice, which turned out to be the University of London in England. In 1964, he earned a PhD in Chinese Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies, one of the schools at the University of London. Upon returning to the United States, he was given a position in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Among his studies during his term in Toronto, in addition to one full-length treatise, San-ch'ü: Its Technique and Imagery, his studies in Chinese poetics and Mongolian grammar have been published in The Journal of Chinese Linguistics, the Journal of American Oriental Society, Mongolian Studies, and Asian Folklore Studies. His poetry translations appear in anthologies such as Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry. Since then, there have been a number of chapbooks of poems. The Darker Edges of the Sky was one of his first collections of poetry not made for academic purposes.
He now resides in a retirement home in Cobourg, Ontario.