Alyse Bensel

Dr. Alyse Bensel teaches creative writing, composition, American Literature, and critical theory at Brevard College. She is the author of the poetry collection Rare Wondrous Things, a poetic biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020), and three chapbooks, most recently Lies to Tell the Body (Seven Kitchens Press, 2018).

Dr. Bensel’s poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Pleiades, South Dakota Review, West Branch, and elsewhere, and her nonfiction and fiction have appeared in The Boiler, Entropy, and Pithead Chapel. She served as Book Reviews Editor for The Los Angeles Review from 2013-2018, and her book reviews have appeared widely in journals such as AGNI, Colorado Review, and Quarterly West. She serves as Poetry Editor for Cherry Tree: A National Literary Journal @ Washington College.

Dr. Bensel also advises Chiaroscuro, Brevard College’s undergraduate literary journal, and directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference, a national literary conference sponsored by Brevard College and the Transylvania County Library Foundation.