2024:
Lesley’s first essay collection City of Toys will be published in The Ohio State University Press’ 21sr Century Essays Series and is due out in early 2025. The manuscript was also a finalist for Barrow Street Press’ prose prize. Here’s what judge Mary Cappello said of City of Toys:
“Deeply learned without being numbingly erudite, the essays in City of Toys are brisk, keen, hilarious, cunning, canny and full of life. I’m convinced that this writer could take any subject put before them and make it new. Nothing about this writing is replicable; it is code-resistant and genre-bending. Like all great essays, City of Toys does knowing differently; it alters our relationship to what we thought we knew via the novel arrangement of sentences and ideas. But there’s more: an essayist who thinks like a poet continuously startles and careens all the while making us glad they’re in the driver’s seat. A finely researched, ruminative and looping feast of a book, City of Toys makes the vastness of its knowledge, its fine bursts of understanding, and the deeply-drilled well of its aphoristic wisdom seem easy. What is this book about, you might ask? I’m not sure that matters, and yet it does: it’s a book that gives free play to childhood sensibilities alongside the adult inventions that would seek to temper them. It’s about Shirley Jackson and automata; AI, dolls, and the Brontes; Edward Albee; Stephen Sondheim, Shakespeare and Keats. It’s about art and love in a time and place where both seem in short supply. It’s about motherhood. It’s feminist. And it was written for us all.”
2022:
New work is up on The Bennington Review and The Rumpus!
Also, check out this press release from the Ohio Arts Council!
Previous:
New work is up on The Kenyon Review, EX/POST, and The Nashville Review! Also, look back on Lesley’s two-years-worth of essays on the Ploughshares blog here!
*An essay on Yayoi Kusama, Joseph Beuys, coyotes and dreams is forthcoming from West Branch!
*"The Haunting of Ill House,” an essay on Shirley Jackson (and other sundry matters) has won Phoebe: A Journal of Literature and Art’s 2019 Nonfiction prize, chosen by Rachel Arndt! The essay will appear in the Spring/Summer online issue.
*You can listen to a recording of “Rabbit-light” up on NELLE’s website HERE!
*Hear a fairy tale poem up on UK writer Helen Cox’s podcast HERE!
*Lesley’s essay “Rabbit-light” has been awarded the inaugural Three Sisters Award in Nonfiction from NELLE! Stay tuned for a recording on NELLE’s website!
*Lesley will be a year-long contributor to the Ploughshares blog, publishing a variety of criticism, personal narrative essays, and author interviews once-a-month in 2019. Keep an eye on the blog starting in January to see what she comes up with!
“Sweet Bird,” an essay about Joni Mitchell (among other things), is up on the Rumpus!
“David Baker, Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review, has nominated the essay “Exit, Pursued by a Bear” published in Issue 6 of The Bennington Review, for a Pushcart Prize!
*Hide Fox and All After was named a finalist for OSU Press’ 2018 Gournay Prize! More info. about the press, the award, and the winner HERE
*Diode has nominated “My Howe Sisters” for Best of the Net!
*Read an essay on deer and breastfeeding in the new online issue of Permafrost HERE
*Read a micro-interview up on The Kenyon Review’s website, HERE
*An essay on spiders, fear, and Virginia Woolf is forthcoming in Shenandoah, The Washington and Lee University Review!
*Read (or listen to) an excerpt of "I Love You. You Have Nice Hands," a memoir about the female voice, in the Sept./Oct. 2018 issue of The Kenyon Review--HERE
* New work is up at Tupelo Quarterly, Issue 15! Find it HERE.
* Lesley's chapbook of poems Punctum : was released by Kent State University Press in 2017, and her full-length poetry collection, Holy Island, was re-released by Gold Wake in 2017. You can purchase Punctum : here and Holy Island here.
* She's recently been hard at work on a collection of essays that mix memoir and creative criticism titled "Hide Fox and All After."
Here's a brief statement on the project-in-progress:
"Central to the collection’s project are essays on rabbits, bears, owls, and foxes—the creatures of the nursery. Anthropomorphism is a pervasive means of communicating cultural values to our children, so I began there. And what grew from that initial investigation were a series of essays concerned with representation and image-making in “grown-up” cultural artifacts as well (visual art, film, literature); it seems that shape-shifting, transformation, magic, and fables do not belong strictly to children’s stories and fairytales; they continue on in “the somber fabric” of adulthood (to quote Nathaniel Hawthorne).
The resulting collection can’t be categorized (necessarily) as literary or art criticism per say, but rather as a phenomenological reading of certain images and stories reinterpreted through the lens of motherhood. I wanted to re-contextualize texts that were/are fundamental to me to see where the mother and child are hidden. I wanted to question and plumb the nature of these relationships—the relationships between mother and child, mother and art, child and art, and I hope—at the very least—Hide Fox and All After communicates the complications inherent in those relationships."
Essays from the collection have been published or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, NELLE, The Bennington Review, phoebe, Permafrost, Waxwing, Diode, Tupelo Quarterly, and At Length. You can find links to many of the pieces in the "prose" section of her website.
