Lynn Powell

Lynn Powell is the author of the poetry collections Season of the Second Thought, winner of the 2017 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin Press; Old & New Testaments, winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award; and The Zones of Paradise. Her poems have been published in many journals, including Poetry magazine, the Georgia Review, the Paris Review, and Shenandoah, and have been anthologized in The Norton Introduction to Literature, 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and Vinegar and Char: Southern Food in Verse. Her nonfiction book Framing Innocence (New Press, 2010) won the Studs & Ida Terkel Award.

Powell has been awarded a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and received four Individual Artist Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council (three in poetry and one in nonfiction).  She worked for 20 years as a Writer in the Schools in grades K-12 in a wide range of schools for the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council’s Arts-in-Education Program.

A native of East Tennessee, Powell has lived in Oberlin, Ohio, since 1990. She teaches poetry and nonfiction in the creative writing program of Oberlin College, where she is the founder and director of Oberlin Writers-in-the-Schools training program for undergraduates.