Author Biography

Elise Paschen, an enrolled member of the Osage Nation, is the author of, most recently, The Nightlife (Red Hen Press, 2017), Bestiary, Infidelities (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), and Houses: Coasts. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she received the Garrison Medal for poetry. She holds M.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees from Oxford University. Paschen received the Rupert Costo Chair in American Indian Affairs Medal in 2019. Her poems have been published in Poetry magazine and The New Yorker, among other magazines, and in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2018 and The Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. She is the editor of The Eloquent Poem: 128 Contemporary Poems and Their Making as well as The New York Times best-selling anthology, Poetry Speaks to Children, and coeditor of Poetry Speaks and Poetry in Motion, among other anthologies. Former Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America, she is a cofounder of Poetry in Motion, a nationwide program which places poetry posters in subway cars and buses. Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute and lives in Chicago with her husband and their two children.

Long Description

"Somewhere in the family romance lies, each of us suspects, the secret or mystery of erotic power, the source of sexual energy to which, with slight but significant variations, we again and again return. Within the givens of familial, racial, gender, and class history lie the materials out of which we must make ourselves. Elise Paschen's Infidelities explores these themes in powerful, striking ways. Paschen is as haunted as everyone else; out of this she has made a haunting book."-Frank Bidart "These poems are passionate, lyrical episodes of precise and dangerous beauty. I'm proud to welcome this very accomplished first book of poetry to the world."-Joy Harjo "Elise Paschen's poems draw upon a dream life which can deeply tincture the waking world. Some of the most compelling-"Diving," for instance, or "Moving House"-have the qualities of dream. But there are many kinds of imaginative acts in this collection, as when the poet, in "Oklahoma Home," magically and movingly enters the consciousness of another person in another time and place."-Richard Wilbur

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