Lisa Eve Cheby, the author of two Buffy the Vampire Slayer inspired chapbooks (dancing girl press), has been published in journals and anthologies including Exposition Review, Santa Ana River Review, So To Speak, Drawn to Marvel, Coiled Serpent, and several anthologies from Women Who Submit. She was writer in Residence at Sundress Academy for the Arts' Firefly Farms and Dorland Mountain Arts. In addition to writing, she is a librarian and advocates for school libraries in California.
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Contact Tracing by Lisa Eve Cheby is a dazzling, sensory and full-body dive into the earliest months of the pandemic; she paints our existence, frozen, even while time moves forward. Cheby demonstrates a remarkable skill with the line, the story and the ability to document a time that we all endured and relate to. We journey with her to the end of this majestic work, an accounting of this fraught time, with a surprising ability to recover, not without scars, and to declare It is OK to enjoy being alive.
—Carla Sameth, co-poet laureate of Altadena and Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow, author of Secondary Inspections (January 2024)
In the isolation of the pandemic lockdown, Lisa Eve Cheby's Los Angeles balcony becomes a microcosm not only of her life in gardening but her life in a world in crisis. Contact Tracing, a work of keen and intimate observation, embodies an exquisite exchange with immediate experience. Cheby's poems stand as an elegy for our collective suffering and a reminder of the importance of community, lest we forget how much we need one another.
– Bonnie S. Kaplan, Poet, Performer, Educator
Lisa Eve Cheby, poet extraordinaire, in Contact Tracing takes us to the core of anxiety and uncertainty as we locked down and Covid chaos reigned. While navigating shifting priorities and familial fault lines Cheby re-creates the world when hummingbirds were sacred visitors and our heartbeat the only sound we heard. Lyrical, mesmerizing, and utterly compelling.
--Désirée Zamorano, author of The Amado Women