Lynne Thompson was Los Angeles’ 2021-22 Poet Laureate and is a Poet Laureate Fellow of the Academy of American Poets. She is the author of four collections of poetry, Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar (What Books Press), Fretwork, winner of the 2019 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize selected by Jane Hirshfield, and most recently, Blue on a Blue Palette, putblished by BOA Editions in April 2024. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Thompson is the recipient of multiple awards including the George Drury Smith Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles, the Tucson Literary Festival Poetry Prize, and the Steven Dunn Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Summer Literary Series to study in Kenya and the Vermont Studio Center. Thompson’s recent work can be found or is forthcoming in the literary journals Best American Poetry 2020, Kenyon Review, air/light, The Massachusetts Review, and  Copper Nickel, and the anthology Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters, and Poems For and About One Mr. Komunyakaa, among others. 

Website: www.lynnethompson.us

Twitter Username: @poetess151

Awards

• Great Lakes Colleges Association's New Writers Award(1998)

Employment

• Director, Employee & Labor Relations, Retired at University of California, Los Angeles (January 1995 - September 2014)

Genres of Interest

Poetry