LISA COFFMAN

(August 14, 1963–)

Poet Lisa Coffman grew up in East Tennessee. Her mother's family lived in Glenmary, Tennessee, a once bustling logging and mining town. She completed her B.A. in computer science and English at the University of Tennessee in 1985, spent a year in Germany as a Rotary Exchange Scholar at Universität Bonn, and then earned an M.A. in English from the creative writing program at New York University in 1989.

Her first book of poems, Likely, won the 1995 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, a national first-book competition sponsored by Kent State University Press and judged by Alicia Ostriker. Coffman has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and Bucknell University, where she was resident poet. The Pew grant allowed her to spend six months in Rugby, Tennessee, studying family history and writing. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary magazines, including the Southern Review and the Philadelphia City Paper.

She has worked as a staff writer for the North Jersey Herald & News (1989–1990), as a freelance writer (1990–1998, 2001–present), and as an English professor at Pennsylvania State University, Altoona College (1998–2001). She has been writing poetry for more than fifteen years. She says, “Place and landscape are enormously important in my poetry, and no place more so than the Southern Appalachian Mountains, where I grew up and lived until I was 21. When I'm away from the mountains—which has been for most of my adult life—I'm often trying to conjure the place in my poems, to fasten down what it is that I love about the region, perhaps so that I won't miss it too badly. The color and cadence of Southern Appalachian speech has been the strongest influence so far on the lines of my poems.”

OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE

PRIMARY

Poetry: Likely (1996).

SECONDARY

Scott Barker, “Poet sings songs of human heart” [review of Likely] Knoxville News-Sentinel (22 June 1997), F7. Patricia M. Gantt, “A Level Gaze Trained at Life: The Poetry of Lisa Coffman,” in Her Words (2002), ed. Felicia Mitchell, 69–81.