Shara Lessley

Shara Lessley is the author of The Explosive Expert's Wife (Winner, Sheila Margaret Motton Prize for Best Collection; Finalist, Julie Suk Award for Best Collection; ForewordIndies Book of the Year Finalist; Montaigne Medal Finalist; Rumpus Poetry Club Selection) and Two-Headed Nightingale. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, her recent awards include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Colgate University's Olive B. O'Connor Fellowship, the "Discovery"/The Nation prize, and a Pushcart. Shara's poems and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, Missouri Review, and New England Review, among others. The inaugural Ann Spencer Poet-in-Residence at Randolph College, Shara is the co-editor of A Poem's Country: Place & Poetic Practice. She currently lives in Dubai.