Shara Lessley

Shara Lessley is the author of The Explosive Expert’s Wife (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), winner of the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize, and Two-Headed Nightingale (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2012). She is also coeditor, with Bruce Snider, of a book of essays, The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice (Pleiades Press, 2018). Her creative nonfiction, twice listed as “Notable” in The Best American Essays, has appeared in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Gettysburg Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She has received a Stegner Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a “Discovery”/The Nation Prize, and other honors. She’s nonfiction editor of West Branch and a consulting editor for Acre Books. (updated 10/2024)