Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet’s The Greenhouse, published this month by Bull City Press, won the 2014 Frost Place Chapbook Contest.  Judge David Baker praised The Greenhouse “for its interplay of restlessness and patience, its mapping of an interiority both shared and dearly personal, and its lyric and maternal primacy. Primacy is the circumstance, yet doubleness is the story, the double birth of the poet’s infant son and her own coming-back-to-language. The poems of The Greenhouse are profound, fundamental works, born of a deep interiority and making their intricate ways, phrase by phrase, toward a design both organic and artful.”  Read more here.

Lisa’s first book, Tulips, Water, Ash, was selected by Jean Valentine for the Morse Poetry Prize. She has been awarded a Javits fellowship and a Phelan Award; her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Quarterly West, The Iowa Review, and 32 Poems and in the anthologies Best New Poets and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry.

Lisa lives in Oakland, California with her husband and son. She works as a freelance writer and editor, teaches in the post-baccalaureate writing program at UC Berkeley Extension, and mentors and edits individual writers. In her spare time she cooks competently, gardens badly, and buys far more books than she will ever read.

Robert Thomas’ latest book, Bridge (click for detail), is a work of fiction published by BOA Editions, Ltd. His first book, Door to Door, was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize and published by Fordham University Press, and his second book, Dragging the Lake, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. He has received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and won a Pushcart Prize.

Robert lives with his wife in Oakland, California, currently in the house where he was born although he has lived in many locations in Northern California, including the North Beach, Russian Hill, Upper Market, Outer Richmond, and Inner Sunset neighborhoods of San Francisco.

Following a distinguished tenure as a barista at Caffe Trieste (Allen Ginsberg said he made a great caffe latte) and a disastrous one as a waiter at Luigi’s, Robert worked for years as a legal secretary in San Francisco, gathering inspiration willy-nilly for Bridge.