Shara Lessley is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her awards include the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship from Colgate University, a Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from University of Wisconsin, The Gilman School’s Tickner Fellowship, and the Discovery/“The Nation” prize. Shara’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, Black Warrior Review, Pleiades, and Gulf Coast, among others. She was recently awarded a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship.