Lisa Cockrel

Image of Lisa Cockrel
MFA Fellow

Lisa Ann Cockrel is an editor and event curator whose own creative writing explores the interplay between social bodies and individual bodies, with a specific focus on fat bodies.  


Biography

For the past three years, Cockrel has been the director of the Festival of Faith & Writing at Calvin College, curating and often hosting conversations with authors including Zadie Smith, George Saunders, Robin Coste Lewis, Paul Harding, Edwidge Danticat, Jamie Quatro MFA ’09, Mary Ruefle ’74, M.T. Anderson, Peter Ho Davies, Joy Williams, Kwame Alexander, Kirstin Valdez Quade, and Marie Howe. She also hosted and co-produced season one of Rewrite Radio, a podcast featuring recordings from the festival’s archives. Prior to that, Cockrel spent 15 years as an editor for magazines and then books. She's currently in her third term of graduate work in the Bennington Writing Seminars and is working on a book manuscript about how being fat has shaped her experience of community. Cockrel grew up in small-town Texas and spent ten years in Chicago but comes to Bennington from Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she’s lived for the last decade. While pursuing her MFA in the Bennington Writing Seminars, she served as a Residential Teaching Fellow for Fall 2018.