Lisa Coffman grew up in East Tennessee and currently lives on California’s Central Coast—two locales that inspire and color her work. She has received fellowships for her poetry 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. Her first collection of poetry, Likely, won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize from Kent State University Press. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke: Erotic Poems; Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia; A Fine Excess: Fifty Years of the Beloit Poetry Journal; and the forthcoming Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VI: Tennessee. An excerpt from her nonfiction manuscript in progress, “No Business, Tennessee,” received the 2010 Ingrid Reti Nonfiction Prize. She teaches at the California State Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo and lives in nearby Los Osos with her husband Joe and daughter Jenna.
