Lisa Low, StoryStudio Chicago’s Curriculum Coordinator, is a talented and award-winning essayist and poet. Her debut chapbook Crown for the Girl Inside published in 2023. You can (and should!) read more about Lisa on her website.
Tell our readers a little about your position here at StoryStudio. What are your big audacious goals for this year and beyond?
Lisa: My position here includes helping to shape the classes and programming that we offer, and working with our amazing instructors. I know it’ll take me a bit, but I want to learn about everyone’s interests/expertise (especially instructors) to build on the work already happening at StoryStudio and in our city!
So you are from Maryland, but got your post-graduate degrees (MFA at Indiana and PhD at Cincinnati) at Midwestern schools, and now you’re in Chicago! What do you like most about the Midwest generally, but Chicago specifically?
Lisa: The people and the good food are my favorite things about Chicago, plus I love that you can get a good flight out of Chicago to anywhere domestically. I also think the Midwest has surprisingly beautiful landscapes where you would expect just flatness and cornfields. Cincinnati with its rolling hills is one of the prettiest cities I’ve lived in.
If you could ask one question of any writer living or dead, what would that question be, why that writer, and most importantly, what would you hope to be the ANSWER to that question?
Lisa: I would ask some of my favorite Chicago writers—Sandra Cisneros, Gwendolyn Brooks, Li-Young Lee—to take me on a tour of their favorite places around town and I hope they say yes!
What do you like to do when you’re not writing award-winning poetry or prize-winning essays?
Lisa: Haha, I feel like I’m mostly writing non-award-winning poetry and essays! Besides that, I love to watch food reality TV shows (Culinary Class Wars was a recent favorite), and I also love to dream about taking up an intimidating hobby like making my own clothes or ice skating.
What are you working on now with your writing?
Lisa: I’m working on essays—last year I wrote an essay on envy, and this year I’m writing one on sloth/laziness and motherhood. I write very slowly, and as a poet, word counts intimidate me, but I try to remember that I’ve been writing sentences my whole life.