Lisbeth White
Writing for an Earth Beloved
Lisbeth White is an eco-abolitionist writer and ritualist living on S’klallam and Chimacum lands near Port Townsend, WA. As a healer and ritualist, she has been a facilitator of community-based healing justice workshops for social justice organizations nationwide.
She is the author of American Sycamore (Perugia, 2022), winner of the Perugia Press Prize, and co-editor, along with Tamiko Beyer and Destiny Hemphill, of the anthology Poetry as Spellcasting: Poems, Essays, and Prompts for Manifesting Liberation and Reclaiming Power (North Atlantic Books, 2023). Her collection of elemental essays won the Masters Review Chapbook Open contest and is forthcoming in 2025.
She has received support for her work from VONA, Artist’s Trust, Tin House, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, SeaSalted Honey, and Blue Mountain Center. She offers support for PGM/BIPOC writers in rural Washington State as a founding member of the Red Thread Writers Collective.
Photo by Sarah Wright Photography
American Sycamore
Winner of 2022 Perugia Press Prize
Finalist for the 2023 First Horizon Book Award
Honorable Mention for the 2023 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize in Poetry
In pursuit of understanding the nuances of belonging and displacement, Lisbeth White travels through mythic, biological, and geological landscapes, attending to the body and its beautiful and terrifying questions. Her journey manifests in a poetic helix of recurring bridges, trees, myths, origins, and awakenings. From the bayou, to Belgium, to Barbados, these poems traverse global terrain while interrogating the dark past/present of America. In American Sycamore, the poet examines the Black diaspora, ancestral reparation, and the sacred feminine, inviting the reader into a deep conversation of seeking and recovery.
“Early in her book American Sycamore, made of poems as formally adventurous and probing and searching as the questions she asks, questions that might never be answered—about family, history, empire, violence, love—Lisbeth White writes, almost as a kind of prayer: ‘the bones the bones know who i am.’ The bones of course are the literal bones—of who came before us, of who loved us before we were born, of who were brutalized in the uncountable, unsayable ways. But the bones are also the poems she has crafted. Which is to say, what music she’s grown from the sorrow.”
— Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights
Poetry as Spellcasting: Poems, essays, and prompts for manifesting liberation and reclaiming power
Edited by Tamiko Beyer, Destiny Hemphill & Lisbeth White
North Atlantic Books, May 2023
Written for poets, spellcasters, and social justice witches, Poetry as Spellcasting reveals the ways poetry and ritual can, together, move us toward justice and transformation. It asks: If ritualized violence upholds white supremacy, what ritualized acts of liberation can be activated to subvert and reclaim power?
In essays from a diverse group of contributing poets, organizers, and ritual artists, Poetry as Spellcasting helps readers explore, play, and deepen their creativity and intuition as integral tools for self- and communal healing and social change.
“Reading Poetry As Spellcasting, I kept lighting my altar, kept nourishing my body with fragrant oranges as I dreamt, wandered, and envisioned. This is a book for us, for opening up the creative portals toward liberation, one tender prompt at a time. I felt held by these rituals and poems, felt myself move deeply into spaces of collective care. Alongside contributions from luminaries such as Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Joan Naviyuk Kane, and Ching-In Chen, the editors invoke magic through heart-igniting reflections and vibrational prompts, beautifully reminding us of our woven power: ‘In this new mythology, you are always whole.’”
—Jane Wong, author of How to Not Be Afraid of Everything
Selected Online Works
Lisbeth’s writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Kweli, Apogee Lit, Green Mountains Review, Willowherb Review, EcoTheo Review, Split this Rock, and Tahoma Literary Review, amongst other wonderful publications.
- Poetry
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“Love Letter to Myself as She Belongs to the Salish Sea”
River Mouth Review, Issue 14, November 2023“Origin of Water”
The Fourth River, Summer Issue 0.11, July 2021“Bridge (series)”
Interim: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics, vol 38.1, Poetry Prize Finalist issue, May 2021“Hull”
Split This Rock, The Quarry, Poem of the Week, March 2021“Awakening of Stones: An Outline”
Blue Mountain Review, Issue 18 pg. 39, April 2020“Myth, Seminal,” “Fixed”
Apogee Lit, Issue 13, December 2019 - Prose
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The Willowherb Review Issue 5, Fall 2022
EcoTheo Collective Social Justice Folio Autumn 2021
- Interviews & Reviews
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The Wildstory: A Podcast of Poetry and Plants by The Native Plant Society of New Jersey
Contact Lisbeth