Summary
Lynne Thompson was the Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, 2021-2022, and is a Poet Laureate Fellow of the Academy of American Poets. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Beg No Pardon,winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar (What Books Press); and most recently, Fretwork, winner of the 2019 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize selected by Jane Hirshfield. Her fourth collection, Blue on a Blue Palette, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in April 2024. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Thompson is the recipient of multiple awards including the George Drury Smith Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles, the Tucson Literary Festival Poetry Prize, and the Steven Dunn Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Summer Literary Series to study in Kenya and the Vermont Studio Center. Thompson’s recent work can be found or is forthcoming in the literary journals Best American Poetry 2020, Kenyon Review, air/light, The Massachusetts Review, and Copper Nickel, and the anthology Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters, and Poems For and About One Mr. Komunyakaa, among others.