Lynne Knight was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York. She graduated from the University of Michigan and from Syracuse University, where she was a fellow in poetry. After living for several years in Canada, she returned to the States with her daughter and taught high school English in Upstate New York before moving to California in 1990. Her first collection, Dissolving Borders, won a Quarterly Review of Literature prize in 1996 and was published as part of its Contemporary Poets Series. A cycle of poems on Impressionist winter paintings, Snow Effects, appeared from Small Poetry Press as part of its Select Poets Series (2000). Her second full-length collection, The Book of Common Betrayals, won the Dorothy Brunsman Award from Bear Star Press in 2002. Her work has appeared in a number of journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ontario Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest and Southern Review. Her work has received Ithe Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest, the Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award from Southern Humanities Review, and a Special Award from Blue Unicorn. One of her poems appears in Best American Poetry 2000, selected by Rita Dove. A cycle of poems, Deer in Berkeley, won the 2003 Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Contest. Life as Weather, another cycle, won the Editor’s Prize from Two Rivers Review in 2005. She lives in Berkeley and teaches writing part-time at two Bay Area community colleges.

Other poems by Lynne Knight in Verse Daily:
September 27, 2005:   "Vermont Barn" " The barn is so weathered it may collapse..."
February 16, 2005:  "Letter To An Old Lover" "What kind of quarrel would go on so long..."
February 6, 2005:  "A Sentimental Education" "Then I thought all I had to do was close my eyes..."
May 24, 2004:  "First Year of My Mother's Dementia" "I opened the door and flicked on the lights..."
April 16, 2004:  "To a Friend Unable to Write" "It looks like nothing much, a scene..."
August 2, 2003:  "Body in Late Meditation" "An hour from now the river will be grey..."
June 13, 2003:  "Driving Through the Valley" "Nothing all that strange about the scene..."
December 10, 2002:  For a Friend Whose Love Has Left "For a week now, the deer has been roaming...."
November 25, 2002:  Letter After the Diagnosis "This is the window I love best. It looks down..."

About Night in the Shape of a Mirror:

"Some poems touch us because they take us where we have been before; some poems take us where we have never been. And some poems take us to places we know deeply but are afraid—or don’t know how—to revisit. In her powerfully felt, intricately rendered poems of yearning, loss, and redemption, Lynne Knight takes us everywhere—for, as she tells us, ‘The soul is not housed. So where, in the calm after rupture, might it not go?’"
—Marcia Falk

"The poems in Night in the Shape of a Mirror are both fierce and delicate in their observations and metaphoric extensions. Lynne Knight handles the subject of her mother’s diminishment with a sense of wonder, sorrow, and acute empathy. Knight reveals this difficult journey with fluid grace and sensitivity. Her mesmerizing poetic voice provides great spirit and music as counterpoint to the tough truths. Her ability to weave the narrative of the body with the narrative of the heart is simply stunning. This poetry is the real thing: humane, original, and necessary."
—Kathleen Lynch

"These are extraordinary poems filled with the gorgeous and excruciating truth of being mortal. Lynne Knight writes about fear and loss with breathtaking courage, finding temporary glimmers of light even in the midst of heartbreaking and inevitable darkness."
—Elizabeth Rosner