Lisa Zimmerman is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate in English and History from Colorado State University and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in St. Louis. She is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Northern Colorado and is a coach for the national high school recitation contest Poetry Out Loud. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in many anthologies and magazines including Cave Wall, Poet Lore, Colorado Review, The Sun, and Apple Valley Review among other journals, and she is the winner of Redbook Magazine’s Short Story contest. Lisa is the author of seven poetry collections including How the Garden Looks from Here (Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award) and The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press). Her latest collections are The Hours I Keep (2016) and Sainted (2021) both from Main Street Rag.
Lisa enjoys inspiring people of all ages and backgrounds to explore their lives and the world around them through image and metaphor. She knows that we all carry poems inside—poems of love and sorrow, poems of frustration, humor, astonishment, and gratitude. She believes, as the El Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton once said, “Poetry, like bread, is for everyone.”