Lisa Fay Coutley

Lisa Fay Coutley’s debut poetry collection Errata (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015) was selected by Adrienne Su as a winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and was named a finalist for the Society of Midland Authors’ Best Book of 2015 and for Foreword Review’s 2015 Book of the Year awards. She is the author of two chapbooks—In the Carnival of Breathing (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition, and Back-Talk (Articles Press, 2010), winner of the Rooms Chapbook Contest.

She is the recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Rona Jaffe Scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize, chosen by Dana Levin. Her poetry and prose have been anthologized in Best New Poets, Best of the Net, Best of Kore Press, The Way North, Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Double Kiss: Contemporary Writers on the Art of Billiards, and on Verse Daily. Best American Essays 2016 named her lyric essay “Why to Run Racks” a Notable Essay of 2015. Recent publications include storySouth, Vinyl, Prairie Schooner, Kenyon Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, Sugar House Review, Crazyhorse, and Poets & Writers.

Lisa Fay received her M.A. (nonfiction) and M.F.A. (poetry) from Northern Michigan University, where she was Poetry Editor for Passages North, and she completed her Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah, where she was Poetry Editor for Quarterly West. She is an annual editor/judge for Black Lawrence Press’ Black River Chapbook Competition. She has taught writing at Northern Michigan University, the University of Utah, Snow College, and the University of Oregon. She has recently joined the University of Nebraska at Omaha Writer’s Workshop, where she is an Assistant Professor of Poetry.