He was educated at the High School of Peking University (????????) from 1984 to 1990. He began to write poems when he was 13 years old. He became one of notable young poets in the 1980s in China and was popular among many young readers.

He received his A.B. degree from Beijing University in 1995, M.A degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1999, and J.D. degree from Yale Law School in 2003. After graduation, he worked in Davis Polk & Wardwell Law Firm.

He Li published many poems and proses in China Youth Daily, People's Literature (????), and other newspapers and journals when he was in middle and high schools. In 1988, when he was around 15 years old, his poems were published in Selected Poems of the Chinese Child Poets (???????, ISBN 7-5007-0400-3).

He Li published his first collection of his poems, Shengming de Doudian (?????, ISBN 7-5301-0220-6), in 1990. Ke Yan (??), a Chinese poet, wrote the foreword for this book.

He Li's another collection of poems, Chenchuan Hou de Hai (?????, ISBN 7-80581-707-3), was published in 1993 in The Fourth Generation of Poets Series (???????).

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