Rosa Lane

Rosa Lane is author of four poetry collections including Called Back (Tupelo Press, 2024), selected from 1300+ manuscripts during Tupelo’s 2022 Summer Open Reading Period; Chouteau’s Chalk (University of Georgia Press, 2019), winner, Georgia Poetry Prize; Tiller North (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2016), winner, National Indie Excellence Award; and Roots and Reckonings, a chapbook published by Granite Press, East (1980) with a partial grant from the Maine Arts Commission. Lane’s Called Back, a title memorializing the last two words Emily Dickinson wrote, is a dramatic monologue in queer conversation with one of our greatest poets, poem after poem, epigraphically evoked, decoding secrets amidst the blatant.

In praise of Lane’s Called Back:

"What marvelous, feral, eccentric, sweetly erotic poems! Like a candle in a frosted window, they illuminate—with electrifying language—the shadows of human love." -Henri Cole

"Reading Called Back is like floating through water, dipping into Lane’s lyric obsession with Emily Dickinson as though on a raft made of erudite diction, vowel sounds, line breaks, and longing. This sexy book does not protest. It does not rant or shriek any grievance, though God knows it has a right to. Instead, it gives Emily back the 'Feral / utterances' Lane suggests her circumstances and time in history forbade her. This radical homage will delight Dickinson scholars and poets alike. And those who don’t know yet how much poetry can liberate them should read it too." -Adrian Blevins

Lane’s most recent work won the 2023 Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Prize, was named “Best of Poetry” for the 2024 Geminga Prize, and was selected as finalist for the 2023 Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition (Cork, Ireland) among other prizes. Lane's poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Catamaran, Cloudbank Journal, Crosswinds, Five Points, Nimrod, Reed Magazine, RHINO, Southword, Sunspot Literary Journal, Third Coast, and elsewhere. Lane received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence (1982) and her master’s in architecture (1988) and her PhD in Architecture and Sustainability (2006) from UC Berkeley. As guest poet, she has participated in Lesley University and Ashland University MFA Writing Programs and taught at Berkeley City College and UC Berkeley. Lane, native Mainer and daughter of a lobsterman, resides in South Portland (Maine) with her wife and Sophia, a kitty rescue.