Lynne Thompson
We are delighted to work with poet, Lynne Thompson on her book Blue on a Blue Palette.
Lynne Thompson is the 2021-2022 Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles. The daughter of Caribbean immigrants, her poetry collections include Beg No Pardon (2007), winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar (2013), from What Books Press; and Fretwork (2019), winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. Thompson’s honors include the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award (poetry) and the Stephen Dunn Prize for Poetry as well as fellowships from the City of Los Angeles, Vermont Studio Center, and the Summer Literary Series in Kenya. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Poem-A-Day (Academy of American Poets), New England Review, Colorado Review, Pleiades, Ecotone, and Best American Poetry, to name a few.
A lawyer by training, Thompson sits on the boards of the Los Angeles Review of Books and Cave Canem and is the Chair of the Board of Trustees at Scripps College, her alma mater. She facilitates private workshops, most recently for Beyond Baroque, Poetry By the Sea Conference, Moorpark College Writers Festival, and Central Coast Writers’ Conference. Thompson is a native of Los Angeles, California, where she resides.
Blue on a Blue Palette
Blue on a Blue Palette reflects on the condition of women—their joys despite their histories, and their insistence on survival as issues of race, culture, pandemic, and climate threaten their livelihoods. The documentation of these personal odysseys—which vary stylistically from abecedarians to free verse to centos—replicate the many ways women travel through the stages of their lives, all negotiated on a palette encompassing various shades of blue. These poems demand your attention, your voice: “Say history. Claim. Say wild.”
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