The Zingara Poetry Project is curated and edited by Lisa M. Hase-Jackson. She is author of Insomnia in Another Town (Clemson University Press), which received the Kansas Author’s Club Nelson Poetry Book Prize. Her first collection of poetry, Flint and Fire (The Word Works) was selected by Pulitzer prize winning poet Jericho Brown for the 2018 Hilary Tham Capital Collection Series. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in such literary journals as Sugar House Review, Verse Daily, Tipton Poetry Journal and Cimarron Review and the anthologies Ice on a Hot Stove (Clemson University Press) and The Strategic Poet (Terrapin Books. She teaches poetry, creative writing, and literature as a Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Books:
From the opening poem of Lisa Hase-Jackson’s impactful collection, Insomnia in Another Town, we learn that “There is no small grief…all are interconnected.” These poems, cloaked in memory and the unmaking and re-making of family, travel us through the harvest of a poet’s life. Like the farms she made grow, this book tills the soil of a human soul and all the many experiences that make it. In pantoums, free verse, and prose poems, Hase-Jackson demonstrates the way that every lived experience weaves into a root system that bears unique fruit, singular as our heartbeats, our winding fingerprints.
Insomnia in Another Town (Clemson University Press, 2024) Winner of the Converse University MFA Alumna Book Prize and awarded the 2024 Nelson Poetry Book Award
—Ashley M. Jones, poet laureate of Alabama
Flint and Fire (The Word Works, 2019) Selected for the 2019 Hilary Tham Capital Collection Series by Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Jericho Brown.
Says Jericho Brown: “Flint & Fire makes plain the terrors of daily life through unflinching, direct statement, not shy about the need to question the ambitions put on us by capitalism and the assumed desire to join middle class America: ‘that we’ll catch up once we are happy, full, sated and clothed.’ The beginning of a lovely career.”
Editorial Work
200 New Mexico Poems: 100 Poems Celebrating the Past, 100 More for the Future–a dynamic celebration of New Mexico’s centennial through poetry. Its mission is to promote a broader understanding of the state’s unusual beauty and delicate ecology as well as foster a greater awareness of its distinct blend of cultural influences. Above all, the project reveals that New Mexico’s enchantment is derived from its people, its stories, and the aesthetics of its environment.
Awards and Recognition:
- Official Event of the New Mexico Centennial
- New Mexico Press Women, Second Place, Communication Category, April 2013, for 200 New Mexico Poems.
- Red Shoes Award, Corrales New Mexico, April 2013, for Contributions to the Poetry Community.
The Zingara Project 