Dennis H. Lee grew up in Brooklyn and would spend Shabbat at his grandparents' home just outside of Seagate, on Coney Island. His parents owned a stationery store on 44th Street in the theatre district of Manhattan, where he met many actors. He graduated from the College of the Sequoias, with a degree in Electronics and he served in the US Navy, part of that time on the USS Enterprise. In the 1960s, he sang with the doo-wop group The Nocturnes, which once followed Richie Havens at the Cafe Wha? in NYC. He worked as a computer software engineer for many years. Dennis and his wife, Donna, co-founded the Delaware Valley Poets Reading Series in Princeton, which continued for more than twenty years.