Joseph Lease is a lyric poet whose work is charged with spiritual longing, ecological urgency, and political insight. His poems are compact, musical, and fiercely humane. His critically lauded collections include Fire Season (Chax Press, 2023), The Body Ghost (Coffee House Press, 2018), Human Rights (Talisman House, 2013), Testify (Coffee House Press, 2011), and Broken World (Coffee House Press, 2007). His work appears in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology and The Best American Poetry 2002 (guest edited by Robert Creeley). The Academy of American Poets featured his poem "True Faith" on poets.org, emailing it to 70,000 subscribers, while The New York Times published his "Free Again (Why don't people)." He has received the Academy of American Poets Prize and grants from Columbia University, Harvard University, Brown University, and California College of the Arts. His innovative work operates at the intersection of the political and personal, exploring language as both resistance and renewal in late-stage capitalism. A member of the Advisory Board of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, he is Professor of Writing and Literature at California College of the Arts, where he mentors emerging poets in experimental and Language poetry traditions.