About

Short bio:

Lesley Wheeler’s sixth poetry collection is Mycocosmic (Tupelo Press, 2025). Her other books include Poetry’s Possible Worlds and the novel Unbecoming. Recent poems and essays appear in Poetry, Best American Poetry 2025, Poetry Daily, and Poets & Writers. Poetry Editor of Shenandoah, she lives in Virginia. Find her on Instagram and Threads at @LesleyMWheeler, Bluesky at @lesleymwheeler.bsky.social, and Linktr.ee.

Full bio:

Lesley Wheeler (she/ they) writes poetry, fantasy fiction, creative nonfiction, and criticism and is represented by Arley Sorg at KT Literary. Her sixth poetry collection, Mycocosmic, runner-up for the Dorset Prize, appeared from Tupelo Press in March 2025. Wheeler’s debut work of nonfiction, Poetry’s Possible Worlds (2022), blends memoir and criticism to read 21st century poetry in light of the cognitive science of “literary transportation”–getting lost in a book. Her novel of dark academia, Unbecoming, appeared in 2020 and was called “an excellent feminist fantasy” in a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly. Wheeler’s writing has been supported by Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers Workshop, Fulbright (New Zealand), the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and she was honored by a 2011 Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council for Higher Education in Virginia. Poetry Editor of Shenandoah, Wheeler is the Henry S. Fox Professor of English at W&L University.

Wheeler’s previous poetry collections are The State She’s In; Radioland; The Receptionist and Other Tales; Heterotopia, selected by David Wojahn for the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize in 2010; Heathen; and the chapbooks Propagation and Scholarship Girl. Heterotopia was a finalist for the Library of Virginia Award. The Receptionist was named to the Tiptree Award Honor List, now the Otherwise Award, and nominated by Ms. Mentor at The Chronicle of Higher Education for an Ackie (academic novel award). Her poems and essays appear in Poets & Writers, Best American Poetry 2025, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Guernica, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Ecotone, Massachusetts Review, Strange Horizons, and many other magazines.

She is the author of two scholarly books, Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920’s to the Present (Cornell, 2008) and The Poetics of Enclosure: American Women Poets from Dickinson to Dove (Tennessee, 2002). Voicing American Poetry was one of three finalists for the Modernist Studies Association Prize. With Moira Richards, Rosemary Starace, and other members of a feminist editorial collective, she coedited Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-po Listserv (Red Hen, 2008). Her reviews have appeared in Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Strange Horizons, and many other journals.

In 2015, Wheeler became the Mid Atlantic Regional Council Chair for the AWP, joining the Board of Trustees until 2018. She teaches courses in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century poetry in English as well as creative writing and speculative fiction. Wheeler received her BA from Rutgers College, summa cum laude, and her PhD in English from Princeton University. Her partner is fiction writer, comics scholar and artist, playwright, and superheroic blogger Chris Gavaler; they live in Lexington, Virginia.

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