About Alyse

Alyse Bensel is the author of the poetry collections Spoil (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2024) and Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020).

Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, Pleiades, Puerto del Sol, Southern Indiana Review, West Branch, Zone 3, and elsewhere. Her essays and fiction have been featured at The Boiler, Cream City Review, South Dakota Review, MAYDAY Magazine, and Pithead Chapel. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, most recently Lies to Tell the Body (Seven Kitchens Press, 2018).

She currently serves as Poetry Editor for Cherry Tree: A Literary Journal @ Washington College.

Alyse served as the Book Reviews Editor for The Los Angeles Review, a literary journal from Red Hen Press, from 2013-2018, and as the Reviews Editor for the Journal of Creative Writing Studies (JCWS), an open-access, peer-reviewed journal on the scholarship of creative writing, from 2024-2026. Her reviews have appeared in AGNI, Colorado Review, EcoTheo Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Tinderbox, and many other journals.

Her scholarly work has been published in Journal of Creative Writing Studies and the International Journal of Mobile Learning and Organisation. Her most recent scholarship has been published in A Socially Just Classroom: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Teaching Writing Across the Humanities, edited by Kris Coffey and Vuslat Katsanis (Vernon Press, 2020). 

Alyse is an associate professor of English at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers' Conference. Questions regarding the conference can be directed to lgrwc [at] brevard [dot] edu.