Don't worry: it's pronounced Shi-ZEv-ski.
Paula Cisewski's poetry collection, The Becoming Game, is available for preorder and will officially launch from Hanging Loose Press on June 15, 2025!
She is also the author of Ceremonies for No Repair, Quitter (Diode Editions Book Prize winner), The Threatened Everything, Ghost Fargo (Nightboat Poetry Prize winner, selected by Franz Wright), Upon Arrival, and several chapbooks, including the lyric prose Misplaced Sinister.
While raising her son, Cisewski earned her BA from St. Catherine's University and her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. During those years, she worked in warehouses, was a mosaic artist mentor, owned a coffee shop, and waited one million tables.
She lives in Minneapolis, where she has for over two decades taught writing privately and academically. She makes visual art at Yew Who Studio and serves as founding co-publisher, co-editor, and book designer for Beauty School Editions. .
Cisewski's work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Columba, Hanging Loose, 32 Poems, Plume, The Glacier, Superstition Review, Posit, Poetry Northwest, Salt Hill Journal, Concision, Bennington Review, the tiny, Conduit, Tammy, Prompt, Vinyl, Brevity, Ping Pong, failbetter, and the BOMBlog. Her poems have been featured on Verse Daily and included in the anthologies Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics, Rocked by the Waters: Poems of Motherhood, Rewilding: Poems for the Environment, Beyond the Frame, and New Poetry from the Midwest.
She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from organizations including the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Oberholtzer Foundation, Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts, and House of Helsinglight. Her poems have been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net.
Cisewski is the poetry curator for The Waves, an occasional cabaret featuring poets and musicians performing a vibrant mix of astonishing, mysterious, beautiful new work. For several years she served as a reader and then as an associate editor of Conduit Magazine, Books, and Ephemera. Before that, she founded and curated Twin Cities' reading series including the open mic night at the Artists' Quarter Jazz Club, St. Paul Calls quarterly poetry & jazz series (with Fred Schmalz), the Imaginary Press Reading Series, several 100K Poets for Change events, the Banfill-Locke's 2013 Reading Series, The Poetry Fort, and the 2014 Maeve's Sessions (with Matt Mauch).
Paula Cisewski's poetry collection, The Becoming Game, is available for preorder and will officially launch from Hanging Loose Press on June 15, 2025!
She is also the author of Ceremonies for No Repair, Quitter (Diode Editions Book Prize winner), The Threatened Everything, Ghost Fargo (Nightboat Poetry Prize winner, selected by Franz Wright), Upon Arrival, and several chapbooks, including the lyric prose Misplaced Sinister.
While raising her son, Cisewski earned her BA from St. Catherine's University and her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. During those years, she worked in warehouses, was a mosaic artist mentor, owned a coffee shop, and waited one million tables.
She lives in Minneapolis, where she has for over two decades taught writing privately and academically. She makes visual art at Yew Who Studio and serves as founding co-publisher, co-editor, and book designer for Beauty School Editions. .
Cisewski's work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Columba, Hanging Loose, 32 Poems, Plume, The Glacier, Superstition Review, Posit, Poetry Northwest, Salt Hill Journal, Concision, Bennington Review, the tiny, Conduit, Tammy, Prompt, Vinyl, Brevity, Ping Pong, failbetter, and the BOMBlog. Her poems have been featured on Verse Daily and included in the anthologies Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics, Rocked by the Waters: Poems of Motherhood, Rewilding: Poems for the Environment, Beyond the Frame, and New Poetry from the Midwest.
She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from organizations including the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Oberholtzer Foundation, Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts, and House of Helsinglight. Her poems have been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net.
Cisewski is the poetry curator for The Waves, an occasional cabaret featuring poets and musicians performing a vibrant mix of astonishing, mysterious, beautiful new work. For several years she served as a reader and then as an associate editor of Conduit Magazine, Books, and Ephemera. Before that, she founded and curated Twin Cities' reading series including the open mic night at the Artists' Quarter Jazz Club, St. Paul Calls quarterly poetry & jazz series (with Fred Schmalz), the Imaginary Press Reading Series, several 100K Poets for Change events, the Banfill-Locke's 2013 Reading Series, The Poetry Fort, and the 2014 Maeve's Sessions (with Matt Mauch).
