Shara Lessley is the author of Two-Headed Nightingale. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, and a Diane Middlebrook Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The coeditor of The Poem's Country: Place and Poetic Practice, she lives in Oxford, England.

“Lessley’s poetry tunes our eyes and ears to recognize that each of us not only holds within ourselves the capacity to inflict terror upon one another, but the capability to endure it as well. This work exhorts us to become numb to neither.”—Consequence