About
Elizabeth J. Coleman is the editor of Here: Poems for the Planet (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), an international ecopoetry anthology with a forward from His Holiness the Dalai Lama and an activist guide from the Union of Concerned Scientists. She is the author of two poetry collections from Spuyten Duyvil Press (one, Proof, a University of Wisconsin Press prize finalist), and of three chapbooks.
Her poems appear in numerous journals and anthologies, including the forthcoming Elemental Series (Humans and Nature Press). Elizabeth’s new collection was a finalist for the 2022 Cider Press Editors’ Book Prize, the 2023 Marsh Hawk Press Prize and the Wandering Aengus Book Award, and a quarter finalist for the 2023 Able Muse Press Prize. Several of her poems are Pushcart Prize nominees.For many years, she was a public interest attorney, and she currently teaches mindfulness. Her avocations are classical guitar and visual art.
Elizabeth’s two poetry collections areThe Fifth Generation (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016) and Proof (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2014), a finalist for the University of Wisconsin Press’s Brittingham and Pollak prizes. She translated into French Pythagoras in Love/Pythagore Amoureux by Lee Slonimsky (Folded Word Press, 2015), a bilingual sonnet collection. Her poems have been published in a number of journals and anthologies. She is the author of three chapbooks, including Autumn in a Solitary Time, a collaboration, with photographs of the Hudson Valley taken by Michael Craig Palmer during the pandemic (Audience Askew Press, 2013).
Her poems have appeared in Baltimore Review, Colorado Review, Rattle, Bellevue Literary Review, Connecticut Review, 32 POEMS, and American Religion (IU Press). They have also appeared in several anthologies, including, most recently, Tree Lines: Twenty-First Century American Poems, Grayson Books (April 2, 2022), Barber J., J. Greenbaum, F. Marchant, eds.) and Together in a Sudden Strangeness: Poets Respond to the Pandemic (Knopf, 2020).
A member of the New York and DC bars, she runs Mindful Solutions LLC., and has taught mindfulness for many years.
Elizabeth is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Swarthmore College, and received an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
“As humans, we grapple with how precious our lives are to us in what appears a vast, indifferent universe. It is finally we who create meaning: in the connections among us, as members of families and communities, small and large, and in our care for the planet in our brief time”
