Lisa Ashley is a Pushcart Prize nominee who descends from Armenian genocide survivors. She has spent many years listening to, and supporting, incarcerated youth. Poems can be found in Willows Wept Review, Juniper, Blue Heron Review, The Healing Muse, Amsterdam Quarterly, Gyroscope, Thimble, Last Leaves, and others. She earned a BA in journalism from the University of Montana School of Journalism and a Master of Divinity from Seattle University. Oubliettes of Light is her first collection and was a finalist for the Sally Albiso Award,2024. Lisa writes in her log home among the firs on Bainbridge Island, WA, having found her way there from rural New York by way of Montana and Seattle. She navigates her life and garden with physical limitations, help from her husband, and unlimited imagination. Her garden and fir grove provide abundant joy and solace as she observes the dancing bees and acrobatic hummingbirds in the air and on the page.

Other poems on the web by Lisa Ashley:
"The Trees Are Lit"
"Solitaire"
"The Rains of November Have Come Again"
"A Child's Touch"
Two poems
"Full Buck Moon"
"Venting"

Lisa Ashley's Website.

About Oubliettes of Light:

"The poems in Lisa Ashley's debut collection are knock your-socks-off good. They are simultaneously lyrical and narrative. The stories are dramatic but are told delicately, with a crystalline economy of words. The poems hit home in the heart and their wisdom remains there. As Ashley says, 'There is no such thing as a whole story' yet these poems tell a story so beautifully as to make the reader feel whole."
—Lillo Way

"There is a striking particularity to the poems in Oubliettes of Light, a grounding in the actual world that allows each scene to spring to life on the page. Lisa Ashley masterfully guides us back into childhood and family history to shed light on generational trauma and abuse, often moving deftly between past and present, light and shadow. Each of these poems is a bright window in the night, 'beaconing' us toward our own healing, and long after I have finished reading them, I still 'feel their silent pull like a prayer.'"
—James Crews

"These are embodied poems where voices of ancestors 'roost' inside a child, break windowpanes of silence, and fill heavy buckets, where childhood memories sashay to Glenn Miller or crackle like bacon rashers in a skillet, where peace is 'feral as a fox at dusk.' Bodies are in peril here-subject to predation, at risk of war or imprisonment-but in Oubliettes of Light, Lisa Ashley generously gathers it all in, and not a petal escapes without a 'clamor of joy.'"
—Bethany Reid