Lynne Thompson's BEG NO PARDON, her first book, won the Perugia Press Prize in 2007 and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award in 2008. She's also the author of Start With A Small Guitar (What Books Press, 2013), FRETWORK (2019), winner of the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize, and Blue on a Blue Palette (BOA Editions, 2024). Thompson is the recipient of multiple awards, among them an Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles. Her work has been widely anthologized including in The Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes and Shifts of Los Angeles and Best American Poetry 2020. Thompson has served on the boards of Cave Canem, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Trustees of Scripps College, and as the inaugural Perugia Press Poet Liaison to the Board, a conduit between poets and the board and a mentor to the latest winning poet. She was the 2021-2022 Poet Laureate to the City of Los Angeles and a 2022 Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow.