Lisa Coffman grew up in East Tennessee and currently lives on California’s Central Coast. She has studied and worked in intensely different environments, all of which filter into her writing–New York City, Philadelphia, and Bonn, Germany; the remote high-desert of Deep Springs Valley; and the abandoned coal mining town of Glenmary, Tennessee. Coffman is the author of two books of poetry: Likely, which won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize from Kent State University Press, and Less Obvious Gods, recently published by Iris Press. Her poetry has earned fellowships 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 work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and has been anthologized in Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke: Erotic Poems; The Southern Poetry Anthology; Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia; A Fine Excess: Fifty Years of the Beloit Poetry Journal; and American Poetry: The Next Generation. She was awarded the 2010 Ingrid Reti Nonfiction Prize for “No Business, Tennessee.”