ABOUT

Lee Peterson’s most recent collection of poems, In the Hall of North American Mammals, won the 2021 Cider Press Review Book Award (Cider Press Review, 2023). The Needles Road, a chapbook, was a Seven Kitchens Press Editor’s Series selection (Seven Kitchens Press, 2022). Her first full-length collection, Rooms and Fields: Dramatic Monologues from the War in Bosnia, was selected by Jean Valentine for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2004).

Where Rooms and Fields explores the anatomy of a genocide, Peterson’s recent collections focus on life and light coming in, on mothering a girl child in a world at once rich with possibility and rife with precarity.

Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily and such journals as Arts & Letters, Bellingham Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Southern Humanities Review, and THRUSH.

Peterson's research, writing, and community interests center on issues of human rights, displacement and migration, motherhood, and the lived experiences of women and girls. She teaches writing at Penn State University and lives in State College with her husband, the novelist Steven Sherrill, and their fifteen-year-old daughter, Esmée.