Paula Cisewski

Paula Cisewski's fourth poetry collection, ​Quitter, won the Diode Editions Book Prize. She is also the author of The Threatened Everything, Ghost Fargo (Nightboat Poetry Prize winner, selected by Franz Wright), Upon Arrival, and several chapbooks, including the lyric prose Misplaced Sinister. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from organizations including the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Oberholtzer Foundation, Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts, and House of Helsinglight. Her poems have been featured on Verse Daily and included in the anthologies Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics, Rocked by the Waters: Poems of Motherhood, Rewilding: Poems for the Environment, Beyond the Frame, and New Poetry from the Midwest.

Most recently, her visual work has been featured on the covers of Rain Taxi Review of Books and Concision Literary Journal, in Folder Magazine, and in the group exhibit Beyond the Page: Poets as Artists in the New Year at Friedli Gallery.

While raising her son, Cisewski earned her BA from St. Catherine's University and her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. During those years, she worked in warehouses, was a mosaic artist mentor, owned a coffee shop, and waited one million tables. She lives in Minneapolis, where she teaches writing privately and academically, collaborates, makes visual work, serves as co-editor of Beauty School Editions and as poetry curator for The Waves, a quarterly cabaret of poets and musicians.