About

Lisa Coffman grew up in East Tennessee
and currently lives on California’s Central Coast. She has studied and worked in intensely different environments, all of which feed her writing–New York City, Philadelphia, and Bonn, Germany; the remote high desert of Deep Springs Valley; and the abandoned coal mining town of Glenmary, Tennessee.

She is the author of two collections of poetry: Likely, which won Kent State University Press’s Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and Less Obvious Gods, with poems featured in Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and numerous anthologies. Coffman’s nonfiction articles have been published by Oxford American, BBC News, Village Voice, Philadelphia Inquirer and elsewhere.

Her writing has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry. She collaborated with composer Timothy Melbinger on the six-poem cycle Hymns to Less Obvious Gods, which premiered in spring 2019.