Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020). Her poems have recently appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, Pleiades, Puerto del Sol, Ruminate, Southern Indiana Review, West Branch, 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 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, 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 (Eds. Kris Coffey and Vuslat Katsanis).
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. Other queries can be made to alyse [dot] bensel [at] gmail [dot] com.
Author photograph by Mercedes Lucero