Don't worry: it's pronounced Shi-ZEv-ski. 
​
Paula Cisewski's fourth poetry collection, ​Quitter, won the Diode Editions Book Prize. She is also the author of The Threatened Everything (Burnside Review Books), Ghost Fargo (Nightboat Poetry Prize winner, selected by Franz Wright), Upon Arrival (Black Ocean), and several chapbooks, including the lyric prose Misplaced Sinister.

Cisewski's work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals and anthologies such as ​78, Salt Hill, Bennington Review, Tammy, Prompt, Vinyl, Brevity, ​Eleven Eleven, A Handsome Journal, failbetter, Revolver, the BOMBlog, REVOLUTIONesque, Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics, and Ping Pong. 

She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Oberholtzer Foundation, and the Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts. Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. 

​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 with Minneapolis teens, owned a coffee shop, and waited one million tables.

Cisewski 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). 

She lives in Minneapolis, where she has taught academically and privately for over a dozen years. She collaborates with fellow artists and activists and serves on the editorial staff of Conduit. 

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

photo: Autumn Pingel

portrait: Jack Walsh

photo: Autumn Pingel