Colorado Poets Center
Lisa Zimmerman
Biography
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Lisa Zimmerman grew up in a military family, graduating from S.H.A.P.E. American High School in Belgium. She received her B.A. in English and History from Colorado State University and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Washington University in St. Louis. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in anthologies as well as magazines including River Styx, the Colorado Review, The Sun, Atlanta Review, Bryant Literary Review, Rhino, and Indiana Review, among other journals. She won the Redbook magazine short story contest in 1986. Her second chapbook Traveling Among the Animals was published in 2002 by Pudding House. Her poetry book manuscript How the Garden Looks From Here recently won the Violet Reed Haas poetry award and is forthcoming from Snake Nation Press. Currently, she teaches composition and creative writing at the University of Northern Colorado and has been a residency artist with Young Audiences of Colorado since 1997. |
Bibliography
Poetry Collections
How the Garden Looks From Here, Snake Nation Press, forthcoming 2004
Chapbooks
Traveling Among the Animals, Pudding House, 2002
In Places Without Time Nothing Hurries, Leaping Mountain Press, 1987,
o.p.
Anthologies
The Gift of Experience, 10th Anniversary Anthology from Atlanta
Review, forthcoming
Prayers to Protest: Poems That Center and Bless Us, Pudding House Publications,
1996
America’s Review: Writing of the Political Movements, 1994
Sleeping With Dionysus: Women and Addiction, Crossing Press, 1993
Men & Women, Together and Alone, The Spirit That Moves Us Press,
1988
Between Mondays, Commonword Press, Manchester, England, 1987
on How the Garden Looks From Here
In Lisa Zimmerman's poems there is much sorrow, often hinted and muted, but there is more joy, spoken and sung. The speaker in these poems loves her children, the sky, the lake, and her horses. She lives in the world as if it's the only one; the things of her life matter—the worth of each blade of grass, each bird, each dream, each word is tangible, weighted, and given to us in a poetry measured and strong.—Rick Campbell
In How the Garden Looks from Here, Lisa Zimmerman's poems resonate, often like Van Gogh paintings. They open for the presence of magpies in a cornfield, for the son who is “not afraid when he wakes,” for the hour filled “with wet boots and socks and black paws.” They tap into archetypal sense, and their powered imagery expresses primal synergy with irreplaceable constituents of the natural world.—James Grabill
Page last updated June 24, 2004
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