Lisa Jarnot


Lisa Jarnot is an American poet. She was born in Buffalo, New York and studied literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1994 she received an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University. She has lived in San Francisco, Boulder, Providence, and London. Since the mid-1990s she has been a resident of New York City. She has taught creative writing and literature at Brooklyn College, Long Island University, Naropa University, and the Poetry Project in New York City.

Writing

Jarnot has edited two poetry journals as well as The Poetry Project Newsletter and An Anthology of New Poetry. She is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: Some Other Kind of Mission, Ring of Fire, Black Dog Songs and Night Scenes. Her biography of the San Francisco poet Robert Duncan was published in August 2012 and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Non-Fiction, and received Honorable Mention in Literature from American Publishers Awards program. Joie De Vivre: Selected Poems: 1992-2012 was published by City Lights in May 2013. Her work has been published in numerous anthologies including Poetry 180 edited by Billy Collins, Great American Prose Poems edited by David Lehman, and the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, 2013.
Regarding Jarnot's Book The Ring of Fire Patrick Pritchett writes, "This is where the human stands before itself as the sign of everything that can be transfigured – in other words, as the site of poetic possibility."
She works as a freelance writer, teacher, and gardener and lives in Jackson Heights, Queens. She is the owner and operator of Sunnyside Landscaping and is a founding member of a free school collective called the Central Park Forest Nursery. Since 2017 she has been a seminary student at New York Theological Seminary and is currently a minister-in-training through the Reformed Church in America at Bowne Street Community Church.

Awards and honors