Lisa Lewis

Lisa Lewis was born in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1956 and grew up there and in Lenoir, North Carolina.

She is the author of the poetry collections The Body Double (Georgetown Review Press, 2016); Burned House with Swimming Pool (Dream Horse Press, 2011); Vivisect (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2010); Silent Treatment (Viking/Penguin, 1998), winner of the National Poetry Series; and The Unbeliever (University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. Her fifth book, The Body Double, won the 2014 Georgetown Review Poetry Manuscript Contest and will be published in 2015.

About her work, the poet Stanley Plumly wrote, “The longing in Lisa Lewis's poems is real not only in the full narrative argument of her lines but in the mindful ambivalence she feels about her body—its sexuality, mortality, earth-transcendence. It is as if she were trying to write her way into silence as well as finding her way from silence.”

Lewis's honors include awards from the American Poetry Review and the Missouri Review, a Pushcart Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems have twice been included in The Best American Poetry Series. She lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma, where she directs the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University and serves as poetry editor for the Cimarron Review.