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Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things, a poetic biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, July 2020). Her poems have recently appeared in or are forthcoming from Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, Pleiades, Puerto del Sol, Ruminate, West Branch, and elsewhere. Her fiction and nonfiction have been featured at The Boiler, Entropy, and Pithead Chapel. She is also 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 and as section editor for Theory, Culture, and Craft for the Journal of Creative Writing Studies (JCWS), an open access, peer reviewed journal.

Alyse served as the Book Reviews Editor for The Los Angeles Review, a literary journal from Red Hen Press, from 2013-2018. Her reviews have appeared in AGNI, Colorado Review, Prairie Schooner, Literary Mama, 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.

Alyse is an assistant 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.

Author photograph by Mercedes Lucero

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