Mari L'Esperance

Mari L'Esperance's full-length collection THE DARKENED TEMPLE was awarded a Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was published by the University of Nebraska Press in September 2008. Of Mari's poems, Peggy Shumaker has written: “These stunning lyrics shine light on suffering. Across generations and across cultures, we follow intricate rituals of desire, of myth making, of mourning. Via corrosive wondering about a disappeared mother, we arrive ‘alone / at the gate of the unbearable.’ And yet these poems, vibrant and necessary, return us to ‘retrievable life,’ to essential human mysteries.” An earlier collection BEGIN HERE was awarded a Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press Chapbook Prize. With Tomás Q. Morín, she has co-edited COMING CLOSE: FORTY ESSAYS ON PHILIP LEVINE (2013 Prairie Lights Books, distributed by the University of Iowa Press). Born in Kobe, Japan to a Japanese mother and a French Canadian-New Englander father and raised in the Pacific Rim, Mari is a graduate of New York University's Creative Writing Program and the recipient of awards and residencies from the New York Times, NYU, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, and Hedgebrook. You can read more at www.marilesperance.com.