Prayer on the Theme of Adoration

Shara Lessley is the author of The Explosive Expert’s Wife (University of Wisconsin, 2018), a winner of the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize, and Two-Headed Nightingale (New Issues, 2011), as well as coeditor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice (Pleiades Press, 2018), an anthology of essays. A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, Lessley has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Washington College’s Mary Wood Fellowship, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Colgate University’s Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship, and a Discovery/The Nation prize, among others. Her work has recently appeared in American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Magma, Bennington Review, IMAGE, and Best American Poetry 2020 and Pushcart Prize anthologies. A consulting editor for Acre Books, Lessley lives in Dubai.