About the Author: Carol Lem

"Carol Lem lives in Sierra Madre, California, and teaches literature and creative writing at East Los Angeles College. She has been writing poetry and playing the shakuhachi since the 1960's. Her work has recently been published in Blue Arc West, an Anthology of California Poets; Living in Storms, Contemporary Poetry and the Moods of Manic Depression; Hawaii Pacific Review, Best of the Decade 1997-2007, and Writers at Work, Poem of the Month (March 2008) online series. A reading of selected poems from her current book, Shadow of the Plum, may be heard on her CD, Shadow of the Bamboo, with music by Masakazu Yoshizawa. For an excerpt of this CD,..."** see the Home Page on this site. Carol has also published poems in The Asian Pacific American Journal, Bachy, Blue Mesa Review, CQ (California Quarterly), Chiron Review, Chrysalis, Contact II, disorient, Harbinger (The Los Angeles Festival), The Illinois Review, Inside English, Liberty Hill Poetry Review, Lucid Stone, Many Mountains Moving, Momentum, Poetry L/A, Pegasus, Poetry Magazine, Rara Avis, Rattle, The Seattle Review, Visions International, Yankee Magazine, Yet Another Small Magazine, and others.

Books include Searchings, Grassroots, Don't Ask Why, The Hermit, The Hermit's Journey: Tarot Poems for Meditation, Moe, Remembrance, Shadow of the Plum and Gathering the Pieces.

Jim Elledge, editor of The Illinois Review, nominated her poem, "Didn't They Tell You Stories?" for the Pushcart Prize. Her work is also represented in What Will Suffice: Contemporary American Poets on the Art of Poetry, edited by Christopher Buckley and Christopher Merrill, and Grand Passion, Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, edited by Suzanne Lummis and Charles H. Webb.