SHARA LESSLEY is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry. Her 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 Gilman School’s Tickner Fellowship, and a “Discovery”/The Nation prize. Shara’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and The Missouri Review, among others. She currently lives in Amman, Jordan.