BIOGRAPHY

Laura Wetherington’s first book, A Map Predetermined and Chance (Fence Books), was selected by C.S. Giscombe for the National Poetry Series. The Brooklyn Rail called the book “humble, folksy, romantic, tough, inventive, and not over-programmed.” Her second book, chosen by Peter Gizzi for the New Measure Poetry Prize, was released with Free Verse Editions. She has published four chapbooks: Dick Erasures (Red Ceilings Press); at the intersection of 3 (Dancing Girl Press), collaboratively written with Jill Darling and Hannah Ensor; Grief Is the Only Thing That Flies (Bateau Press), which Arielle Greenberg selected for the Keel Chapbook Contest; and most recently, Little Machines (Salò Press). Her poem “No one wants to be the victim no one when there is a gun involved and blue” was adapted as an artist book by Inge Bruggeman.

Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Poem-A-Day, Conjunctions, Pleiades, Narrative, Michigan Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, FENCE, among others, and in three anthologies: Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket Books), The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare (Nightboat Books), and 60 Morning Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse). Her essays, book reviews, and ephemera have appeared in Pleiades, The Volta, Hyperallergic, Full Stop, Jacket2, 1508, and in two anthologies: Nothing on Atkins edited by Richard Parker (Crater Press) and Queenzenglish.mp3 edited by Kyoo Lee (Roof Books).

Laura co-founded and, for a decade, co-edited textsound.org: an online journal of experimental poetry and sound. Poets & Writers named textsound an “indie innovator,” one of a small group of “groundbreaking presses and magazines that are redrawing the publishing map.” She developed an integrated curriculum for graduate and undergraduate students working on the Sierra Nevada Review and for four years taught those classes. In 2014 she joined Baobab Press as their poetry editor.

Wetherington is a graduate of University of Michigan’s MFA program, UC Berkeley’s Undergraduate English Department, and Cabrillo College. She has taught for the French Ministry of Education, the University of Michigan, the New England Literature Program, Eastern Michigan University, Sierra Nevada University’s Humanities Department and Low-Residency MFA Program, Amsterdam University College, and for the Nevada Arts Council’s writers in the schools program. She currently teaches creative writing in University of Nevada Reno’s Low-Residency MFA Program and with the International Writers’ Collective. Grants include a 2017 & 2015 Artist Fellowship in Literary Arts from the Nevada Arts Council and a 2014 Artist Grant in Literature from the Sierra Arts Foundation. She has attended residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Camac, and (with Hannah Ensor) Pasture Project Space. In 2025 she’ll be in residence at Kimmel Harding Nelson.