Lisa Sewell

My focus is on contemporary poetry and poetics, both as a scholar and practitioner. In the graduate program, I teach courses on contemporary poetry, documentary poetry, feminist theory, ecopoetics, and environmental theory. At the undergraduate level, I also regularly teach creative writing courses with a focus on poetry. I have published critical essays on contemporary North American poetry and poetics including essays on Louise Glück, Brenda Hillman, and Frank Bidart, and have contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to Post-1945 American Poetry, A Companion to Poetic Genre, and The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century American Women’s Poetry. I am co-editor of three collections of critical essays that focus on 21st century North American poets, most recently North American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language, with Kazim Ali.

I have also published four full-length collections of poetry and a new book, Flood Plain will appear in January 2025. My poems have appeared in journals such as the Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Ploughshares, Paris Review, and Harvard Review among others, and have been featured on the Academy of American Poets website and on the podcast The Slowdown. I have also received grants and awards from the Leeway Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.