dawn lonsinger was born in the deer-streaked woods just west of Philadelphia, now lives in Brooklyn, and – like most living organisms – has a thing for light. She is the author of Whelm — winner of the Idaho Prize in Poetry, Cornell’s Freund Prize, and Shelf Unbound Notable Book of the Year — from Lost Horse Press distributed by the University of Washington Press. Her writing is informed by the focus of her doctoral work: the poetics of crisis, wayward enactments of grief, and what Czesław Miłosz called “A Poetics of Hope,” and she believes that we are born into a crucible of overwhelming forces and remarkable abundance—both outside of us and inside of us—which we are always learning how to navigate and thrive within, and that we do a better job when we help each other. She became a writer and teacher of creative writing and literature largely because literature helps us to reckon with the past, see the texture and density of the present, and envision better futures … because art, at its best, seeks: to express and understand the complexity of the human condition; to help us, in turns, bear and enjoy that condition; to honor the particularity of lives; to return dignity to our interiority and emotions; to challenge pat abbreviated interpretations of anyone or anything; to relish in the strangeness and impact of language; to stretch our understanding of the universe beyond the limits of time and space; and to explore the ethical dimensions and limits of our lives. 

Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Colorado Review, Subtropics, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, Beloit Poetry Journal, Guernica, Los Angeles Review, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. Lyric essays have appeared in Black Warrior Review and Western Humanities Review. She is the recipient of the Corson Bishop Prize, Smartish Pace’s Beullah Rose Prize, a Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship to South Korea. She has also won the Scowcroft Prize (chosen by Lidia Yuknavitch), an Academy of American Poets Prize (chosen by Heather McHugh), three Utah Arts Council Writing Awards, the Utah Writers’ Contest in prose (chosen by Susan Steinberg) and poetry (chosen by Wayne Koestenbaum), runner up for the Poetry Society of America’s Emily Dickinson Award (chosen by H.L. Hix), runner up for The Bat City Review Art & Writing Collaboration Prize (chosen by Tomaž Šalamun), and was awarded four Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes. She was selected by Claudia Emerson for Best New Poets 2010 and by The Pennsylvania Center for the Book for their 2016 Public Poetry Project. 

lonsinger holds a B.A. in Studio Art & English and an M.A. in Literature from Bucknell University (where she was a Research Assistant for the Social Justice College), an M.F.A. in Poetry from Cornell University, and a Ph.D. in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Utah. She is the Director of the Creative Writing Program and Associate Professor of Literature & Creative Writing at Muhlenberg College where she teaches workshops in poetry, creative nonfiction, the lyric essay, speculative fiction, and graphic narrative, as well as writing seminars (on Bodies in Transformation in Literature & Film, Immigrant Literature, and Dystopian Literature), Writing about Place, Reading for Writers: Aesthetic Theory, Writing via Visual Art, and literature courses on contemporary poetry, monstrosity in literature and film, and apocalyptic literature, for which she was recently awarded the the Paul C. Empie ’29 Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching. She has also taught creative writing workshops for Johns Hopkins University’s CTY Program, in third and fourth grade classrooms, for 826NYC, and at girls’ detention centers. She has held editorial positions at Western Humanities Review, Epoch Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and was an AWP Writer to Writer mentor. 

She has recently finished a creative nonfiction book, and is now at work finishing a manuscript of poetry, The Long and Terrible Taming, which considers domestication in all its manifestations, our relationship to wildness, and our desire to sometimes exile it and sometimes bring it near, but in an altered subdued state. She is also at work on a speculative fiction novel, Beast, that strives to upend our ontological assumptions about animality versus humanity.