Shara Lessley is a former Stegner Fellow. Her awards include the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship, the Tickner Fellowship, and a “Discovery”/The Nation prize. Shara’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Cincinnati Review and Alaska Quarterly Review, among others. Her collection, Two-Headed Nightingale, is available from New Issues in 2012. She currently lives in Amman, Jordan.