Lynn Powell

Biography

Lynn Powell is the founding director of Oberlin Writers in the Schools (WITS), a program that engages Oberlin students in teaching creative writing in local schools. She also teaches a wide range of poetry and nonfiction courses in the college‘s Creative Writing Program.

Powell is the author of three books of poetry: Old & New Testaments (winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry); The Zones of Paradise; and Season of the Second Thought (winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry). Her nonfiction book, Framing Innocence: A Mother’s Photographs, A Prosecutor’s Zeal, and a Small Town’s Response, won the Studs and Ida Terkel Award from the New Press.

Her poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including the Paris Review, the Georgia Review, Poetry, FIELD, 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Everyday, and the Norton Introduction to Literature. Her poetry and prose have been honored with a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and four Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards.

Powell worked as a writer in the schools for more than 20 years—in grades K-12, in urban, suburban, and rural schools—for the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. Drawing on that expertise, Powell created Oberlin’s Teaching Imaginative Writing workshop, CRWR 450, a community-based learning course in which Oberlin students work collaboratively with her in poetry residencies in the Oberlin public schools.