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.
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.
Paula is a founding co-publisher, co-editor, and book designer for Beauty School Editions. She lives in Minneapolis, where she has for over two decades taught writing privately and academically. Her collage and printed works sometimes appear under the moniker Yew Who Studio and have appeared in places including FOLDER Magazine and on the covers of Rain Taxi Review of Books and Concision Poetry Journal.
Cisewski's poems and prose have 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.
For several years she served as a reader and then as an associate editor of Conduit Magazine, Books, and Ephemera. She founded and curated many Twin Cities' reading series including The Waves Cabaret with Maura Bosch, 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 small traveling pop-up, 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.
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.
Paula is a founding co-publisher, co-editor, and book designer for Beauty School Editions. She lives in Minneapolis, where she has for over two decades taught writing privately and academically. Her collage and printed works sometimes appear under the moniker Yew Who Studio and have appeared in places including FOLDER Magazine and on the covers of Rain Taxi Review of Books and Concision Poetry Journal.
Cisewski's poems and prose have 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.
For several years she served as a reader and then as an associate editor of Conduit Magazine, Books, and Ephemera. She founded and curated many Twin Cities' reading series including The Waves Cabaret with Maura Bosch, 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 small traveling pop-up, and the 2014 Maeve's Sessions (with Matt Mauch).
