Lianne Spidel grew up in Detroit, the daughter of an automotive artist. She is a graduate of Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, and the University of Michigan.
A high school English teacher for 31 years in Michigan, Maryland, and Ohio, she found herself invariably the advisor of the school newspaper, but her first love was creative writing, working with her students' original work and encouraging them to publish and compete. Their successes challenged her to return to writing poetry herself, and she became a member of the Greenville Poets in 1988. She retired from the Greenville, Ohio, school system in 1998 and since then has taught classes in writing and literature in a local retirement community through Edison Community College in Greenville, where she lives.
Her poetry book What To Tell Joseme is available from Main Street Rag. Her chapbook Chrome was published in 2006 by Finishing Line Press. In 2012, Lianne's chapbook Pairings (with Anne Loveland, Michigan artist) was published by Dos Madres. Among her publishing credits are poems in Poetry, Shenandoah, Poetry Daily, Atlanta Review, Nimrod, Rhino, Main Street Rag, and Rattle, among other journals, and in the anthology I Have My Own Song For It: Modern Poems of Ohio. One of her favorite poetry subjects is art; another is people, and the people she knows appear frequently in her work: her artist father and irrepressible mother, her sons John and Dan, her daughter-in-law Sara and her five grandchildren Elizabeth, Sarah, Claire, Annie and Sam.
Books by Lianne Spidel
