Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet is the author of The Greenhouse (Frost Place Prize, Bull City Press) and Tulips, Water, Ash (Morse Poetry Prize, Northeastern University Press). Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Plume, Zyzzyva, Kenyon Review, Nasty Women Poets, and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. Stonestreet’s honors include Javits and Phelan fellowships and residencies at Millay Colony for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Frost Place, and Mineral School; she was the second U.S. writer ever shortlisted for Australia’s prestigious Porter Prize. She holds a BA in Contemporary American Literature from Yale and an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she works as a freelance editor and manuscript consultant; teaches through Literary Arts, Hugo House, and the Writing Salon; and served as host of the reading series Lilla Lit and Literary Bingo.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
My manuscript in progress, Annihilation, explores variations on perfectionism and absolutism, in areas from body image to autoimmune disorder to fundamentalism and fascism. Several poems look at secular Jewish identity in terms of whiteness, and Whiteness – how we are perceived, the ways we perceive ourselves, and how those may translate to impulses toward safety, responsibility, and allyship in a time of rising racism and antisemitism. And regardless of overt topic, the speaker in these poems is aware of herself as Jewish and female, with a voice and perspective that draws from family history and diction.
Published Works
The Greenhouse (Bull City Press, 2014)
Tulips, Water, Ash (Northeastern University Press, 2009)
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
Video Reading
Education
Yale University, BA in Contemporary American Literature
Warren Wilson, MFA Program for Writers