Bonnie Lyons
Bonnie Lyons is an American poet, writer, and retired professor.
Bonnie Lyons just published her ninth book, Mirian Talks Back. Her first book (Henry Roth: the Man and His Work) was a groundbreaking study of the author. Passion and Craft, her second book (co-authored with Bill Oliver) contains literary interviews with thirteen fiction writers. In some cases, such as the interview with Gina Berriault, the interview is the only one the author ever gave. Subsequently many of these interviews have been anthologized in collections of interviews by individual writers. The next five books are collections of her poetry. Three of these (Hineni, Meanwhile, and So Far) are chapbooks; In Other Words and Bedrock are both full-length books of poems. A recent book, WOW: Wonderful Old Women, is a collection of interviews with remarkable San Antonio women over eighty years old. She has recorded a CD (Miriam Talks Back and Other Voices from the Hebrew Scriptures) reading her own poetry.
Bonnie has published more than sixty articles and literary interviews in a wide variety of scholarly journals like American Literature and literary magazines, including The Paris Review. She has an entry in Wikipedia. More than sixty of her poems have appeared in a wide variety of poetry journals. Her poetry has been anthologized in The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, Art at Our Doorstep, and Risk, Courage and Women.
Bonnie joined the English Department of The University of Texas at San Antonio in 1976. Over the years she taught many, many different courses including honors seminars she created, such as The Journey as a Motif in Literature and Film, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Female Development in Fiction and Film, Ibsen, Chekhov, and Strindberg, and the first class ever taught that focused on the entire acclaimed television series, “The Wire.” She received two Fulbright awards and taught in Greece for a year and Barcelona for a semester. Additionally she taught about the Bloomsbury group and Drama: Text and Performance for a semester in London for the University of Texas system. She also lectured in Israel and Italy as a Fulbright scholar. During her career at UTSA, she received awards for creative work, research, and twice for teaching. She has done poetry readings in bookstores, academic panels, temples and churches in Chicago, Miami, Boston and San Antonio and read academic papers at many national conferences. She has been an active participant in San Antonio’s literary scene and taught for Gemini Ink, the Sol Center, Oasis, Bihl Haus, and a local senior center.
Most summers, Bonnie and her husband Grant Lyons travel to Vermont to escape the heat and to see their daughter Eve Lyons, her wife JL and their son, Marquam.
