Shara Lessley

Shara Lessley is a writer and teacher. The author of
Two-Headed Nightingale and The Explosive Expert’s Wife (forthcoming 2018), she is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Shara’s awards include the Mary Wood Fellowship from Washington College, an Artist Fellowship from the State of North Carolina, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship from Colgate University, the Reginald S. Tickner Fellowship from the Gilman School, and a “Discovery”/The Nation prize. Shara was the inaugural Anne Spencer Poet-in-Residence at Randolph College. She currently serves as Operations Director for Oxford Writers’ House.

Shara’s poems and essays have appeared in Ploughshares,
The Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Missouri Review, and New England Review, among others. Her work is featured in Ghost Fishing: An Ecojustice Poetry Anthology, The Ecopoetry Anthology, Still Life with Poem: Contemporary Natures Mortes in Verse, The Book of Scented Things: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, and The Rumpus Poetry Anthology. A recipient of scholarships from ArtsBridge and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Shara holds Bachelor’s degrees in Dance and English from University of California, Irvine, and an MFA in Poetry from University of Maryland. She was awarded a 2015 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Oxford, England.