Lynn Emanuel Biography
Lynn Collins Emanuel (born March 14, 1949) is an American poet. Some of her poetry collections include Then, Suddenly— and Noose and Hook (University of Pittsburgh Press).
She has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Eric Matthieu King Award from the Academy of American Poets. She also won the 1992 National Poetry Series Open Competition for The Dig, and has been awarded a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have been published in literary magazines and journals including Parnassus, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Hudson Review, Slate and Ploughshares, and in anthologies including The Best American Poetry anthologies in 1994, 1995, 1998, 1999, and 2000, and the Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Emanuel is Director of the Writing Program, and Director of the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series, and a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. She has also taught at the Warren Wilson Program in Creative Writing, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is married to the anthropologist, Jeffrey H. Schwartz, and they reside in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
If I could see nothing but the smoke
From the tip of his cigar, I would know everything
About the years before the war.
If his face were halved by shadow I would know
...
Right now as I am talking to you and as you are being talked
to, without letup, it is becoming clear that gertrude stein has
hijacked me and that this feeling that you are having now as
you read this, that this is what it feels like to be inside
...
It's early morning. This is the "before,"
the world hanging around in its wrapper,
blowzy, frumpy, doing nothing: my
neighbors, hitching themselves to the roles
...
After I've goosed up the fire in the stove with Starter Logg
so that it burns like fire on amphetamines; after it's imprisoned,
screaming and thrashing, behind the stove door; after I've
listened to the dead composers and watched the brown-plus-gray
...
Even the butter's a block of sleazy light. I see that first,
as though I am a dreary guest come to a dreary supper.
On her table, its scrubbed deal trim and lonely as a cot,
is food for one, and everything we've ever hated: a plate of pallid
...
Delivering Poems Around The World
Poems are the property of their respective owners. All information has been reproduced here for educational and informational purposes to benefit site visitors, and is provided at no charge...
12/5/2025 8:09:41 AM # 1.0.0
