Brooding Eels

Lisa Williams is the author of two collections of poetry, Woman Reading to the Sea (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008), which won the 2007 Barnard Women Poets Prize; and The Hammered Dulcimer (Utah State University Press, 1998), which won the 1998 May Swenson Poetry Award. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Poetry , Image , Measure , Poetry Daily , Verse Daily , and other magazines, and in anthologies including Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds (Columbia University Press, 2010), The Best American Poetry 2009 (Scribner Poetry, 2009), and American Poetry: Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000). Her essays on contemporary women poets have appeared in The Hollins Critic , The Cincinnati Review , and Poetry Daily . She is the recipient of a 2011 Brown Foundation Fellowship, a 2010 Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship, and a 2004 Rome Prize. Williams is an associate professor of English at Centre College. Photo by Philip White, 2012