BIO
Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of HOST, selected by Jesse Lee Kercheval and Sean Bishop for the Wisconsin Poetry Series (University of Wisconsin Press, February 2024), tether (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), a Foreword Review Book of the Year Award finalist, Errata (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), selected by Adrienne Su as a winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and named a finalist for the Society of Midland Authors’ Best Book of 2015 and Foreword Review’s 2015 Book of the Year awards, In the Carnival of Breathing (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition, and Small Girl: Micromemoirs (Harbor Editions, May 2024). She’s also the editor of the grief anthology, In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence Press, February 2024).
She is the recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Rona Jaffe Scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize, chosen by Dana Levin, and the 2021 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, selected by Natalie Diaz. Her poetry and prose have been anthologized in/on Best New Poets, Best of the Net, Best of Kore Press, The Way North, Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Double Kiss: Contemporary Writers on the Art of Billiards, Bodies Built for Game, The Familiar Wild, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. Best American Essays 2016 named her lyric essay “Why to Run Racks” a Notable Essay of 2015, and her essay “Why to Crochet,” exploring sexual trauma and memory, was named a finalist for the 2022 Terry Tempest Williams CNF Prize and was published in North American Review. In 2023, her poetry was translated into Italian and published in Nuovi Argomenti. Her most recent prose and poetry publications include Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Account, Barrelhouse, Brevity, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, and The Slowdown.
Lisa Fay received her M.A. (nonfiction) and M.F.A. (poetry) from Northern Michigan University, where she was Poetry Editor for Passages North, and she completed her Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah, where she was Poetry Editor for Quarterly West. She has taught writing at Northern Michigan University, the University of Utah, Snow College, and the University of Oregon. At present, she is an Associate Professor of Poetry & Creative Nonfiction at the University of Nebraska at Omaha Writer’s Workshop, where she advises the campus literary journal, 13th Floor, and she is the Chapbook Series Editor at Black Lawrence Press.
Read Lisa Fay’s poems or prose
See her Curriculum Vitae