Shara Lessley Biography

Shara Lessley is a writer and teacher. The author of Two-Headed Nightingale, she is also a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Shara’s awards include an Artist Fellowship from the State of North Carolina, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship from Colgate University, the Reginald S. Tickner Fellowship from the Gilman School, and a “Discovery” The Nation prize.

Shara’s poems and essays have appeared in Ploughshares,
The Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Fence, and New England Review, among others. Her work is featured in The Rumpus Poetry Anthology and The Ecopoetry Anthology. A recipient of scholarships from ArtsBridge and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, as well as the Moondancer Fellowship in Nature and Outdoor Writing from The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, Shara holds bachelor’s degrees in Dance and English from University of California, Irvine, and an MFA in Poetry from University of Maryland. She is the 2014 Mary Wood Fellow at Washington College.
She currently lives in Amman, Jordan.