Shara Lessley

Shara Lessley was born and raised in central California. She is the author of The Explosive Expert’s Wife (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), winner of the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize for best collection and a Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection, and Two-Headed Nightingale (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2012). With Bruce Snider, she coedited The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice (Pleiades Press, 2018), an anthology of essays. Affirming Wisława Szymborska’s assertion that “After every war / someone has to clean up,” Lessley often considers overlooked or silenced female perspectives in poems that interrogate American violence, complicity, and vulnerability. Her most recent work, which appears in Best American Poetry 2020, the Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, IMAGE, and The Nation, swings between apprehension and belief as it cycles through illness, anxiety, spiritual estrangement, and reengagement.

Lessley’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Colgate University, Washington College, the Gilman School, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences. She was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and a “Discovery”/The Nation Prize. A recipient of the Collins Prize, the Patricia Aakhus Award, and the Erika Mumford Prize, Lessley has been featured in The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, The EcoPoetry Anthology, and Ghost Fishing: An Ecojustice Poetry Anthology, among others.

Randolph College’s inaugural Anne Spencer poet-in-residence, Lessley earned her MFA at the University of Maryland. She is editor-at-large for West Branch and consulting editor for Acre Books.