Lemon Andersen at the NYS Writers Institute in 2014

Lemon Andersen is a writer, performance artist, screen actor, and Tony Award-winning poet. Lemon is also a three-time felon who grew up in Brooklyn, the child of a Puerto Rican mother and Norwegian American father, both heroin addicts who died of AIDS before he was fifteen. Left to fend for himself, he dropped out of high school and spent years in jail and on probation. His attempts at rehabilitation faltered until he attended a poetry reading and discovered he had a gift for expressing himself through words.