The formal bio:
Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet’s book of poems, Tulips, Water, Ash, was selected by Jean Valentine for the 2009 Morse Poetry Prize. Lisa’s poems have been awarded a Javits fellowship and a Phelan Award and have appeared in journals such as Blackbird, The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, 32 Poems, Third Coast, and Quarterly West and in the anthology Best New Poets. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and son.
Some other stuff that may or may not be of interest:
I grew up in Stockton, California, part of a loving, supportive family. Nevertheless, much of my childhood was spent (a) reading and (b) plotting my escape. I went to college at Yale University, where I enrolled as an English major. Whapped upside the head by critical theory, I fled to the relative safety of American Studies, which worked out pretty well since I got credit for reading contemporary poetry and fiction.
The day after graduation, I bought a plane ticket to San Francisco. I waited tables, answered phones, ate a lot of cheap burritos, wrote a lot of bad poems. Eventually I started a small arts magazine, which ran out of money after a few years but gave me the skills to make a living as an editor.
In my late 20s, after a disastrous stint in New York (working on an online fashion magazine—don’t ask), I returned to SF and became serious about writing poetry. I took classes, attended conferences and residencies, won a few awards. In the wake of the dot-com crash, I moved to Lake Tahoe and taught freshman comp at two local colleges, moved back to San Francisco, got married, and got pregnant.
Since I clearly wasn’t busy enough, from 2003-2005, I also attended the low-residency Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers on a Javits fellowship. This was a kind of heaven for me—a community of people who were as passionate about craft as I was, who challenged and supported each other, who reminded me that what I was trying to do mattered. It was the best educational experience of my life.
At the end of 2008, my poetry manuscript was chosen by Jean Valentine for the Morse Poetry Prize, to be published by University Press of New England. I’d been working on, and submitting, the manuscript for what seemed like forever—seven years, 96 contest entries/submissions to presses, a dozen times a contest finalist… the usual story. (I list these numbers because hearing similar stories from others helped me keep faith along the way.) By that time, the book had become a completely different thing than I’d started with.
Tulips, Water, Ash was published in September 2009.
Now I live in San Francisco with my husband and son. I’ve been at home with T. for most of the last three years, and find myself coming out of the crucible of early parenthood/acute sleep deprivation still blinking a bit in the sunlight. In between mom-ing, teaching, and editing, I’m working on the poems for my next book.
author photo by John Martin
