About
Elizabeth J. Coleman is a poet, attorney, guitarist. She also teaches mindfulness, and is a visual artist.
Elizabeth is the author of Mega-Galaxes, winner of the the 2025, Adrift Chapbook Prize chosen by poet Matthew Olzmann. Mega-Galaxies will be published by Driftwood Press in 2026.
She is the editor of Here: Poems for the Planet (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), an international eco poetry anthology with a forward from His Holiness the Dalai Lama and an activist guide from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Here brings together Elizabeth’s love for our planet and for social justice, and she gives all her royalties to the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Elizabeth’s new collection was a finalist for the 2022 Cider Press Editors’ Book Prize, the 2023 Marsh Hawk Press Prize, the 2023 Wandering Aengus Book Award, the 2024 Tenth Gate Prize, and a quarter finalist for the 2023 Able Muse Press Prize. Several of her poems are Pushcart Prize nominees.
Elizabeth’s two poetry collections are The Fifth Generation (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016) and Proof (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2014), a finalist for the University of Wisconsin Press’s Brittingham and Pollak prizes. She translated into French Pythagoras in Love/Pythagore Amoureux by Lee Slonimsky (Folded Word Press, 2015), a bilingual sonnet collection.
Her poems appear in, among others, 32 Poems, Baltimore Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Berkeley Literary Review, Cider Press Review, Colorado Review, and Rattle, American Religion (IU Press) and in numerous anthologies, including including Tree Lines: Twenty-First Century American Poems, Grayson Books (April 2, 2022) (Barber J., J. Greenbaum, F. Marchant, eds.) and The Elemental Series, Humans and Nature Press (2024) (Van Horn, Gavin, Jennings, B., Brown, N., and Santos Perez, C., eds.).
Elizabeth is the author of three chapbooks, including Autumn in a Solitary Time, a collaboration, with photographs of the Hudson Valley taken by Michael Craig Palmer during the pandemic (Audience Askew Press, 2013).
A public interest attorney for many years, and a French teacher, before that, Elizabeth is the grandmother of four, and lives with her husband in New York City.
A classical guitarist, Elizabeth performs weekly for patients and families, and staff in a New York hospital. Her music can be found on Spotify.
A member of the New York Bar, she runs Mindful Solutions LLC., and has taught mindfulness for many years. She is also a collage artist.
Elizabeth is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Swarthmore College, and the Fieldston School.
“As humans, we grapple with how precious our lives are to us in what appears a vast, indifferent universe. It is finally we who create meaning: in the connections among us, as members of families and communities, small and large, and in our care for the planet in our brief time”
