Paula Cisewski

Paula Cisewski's fourth poetry collection, Quitter, won the 2016 Diode Editions Book Prize. She is also the author of The Threatened Everything (finalist for the Burnside Review Book Prize), Ghost Fargo (winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize selected by Franz Wright), Upon Arrival (Black Ocean), and several chapbooks, including the lyric prose Misplaced Sinister. She has been awarded fellowships from the Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. She lives in Minneapolis, where she teaches, both academically and privately. (more below)

portrait: Jack Walsh

photo: Autumn Pingel

Paula's work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies such as Midway Journal, Prompt, Vinyl, Brevity, Eleven Eleven, Diode, Conduit, A Handsome Journal, failbetter, We Are So Happy to Know Something, Revolver, the BOMBlog, REVOLUTIONesque, Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics, Resistance Journal, and Ping Pong. Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Cisewski has founded and curated several Twin Cities' reading series over the last couple decades, 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, and the 2014 Maeve's Sessions (with Matt Mauch).

Along with her artist husband Jack Walsh, Paula is a cofounder of Poetry Fort and JoyFace Poetry & Arts.

While raising her son and earning her BA from St. Catherine's University and her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, Paula worked in warehouses, was a mosaic artist mentor to Minneapolis teens, owned a coffee shop, and waited one million tables.​​

While raising her son and earning her BA from St. Catherine's University and her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, Paula worked in warehouses, was a mosaic artist mentor to Minneapolis teens, owned a coffee shop, and waited one million tables.