Beauty School Editions, LLC
Beauty School Editions, LLC is an independent publisher committed to seeking possibility and connection in unlikely, sometimes complicated places. We aim to make new space and illuminate.
BEAUTY IS INCLUSIVE
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Paula Cisewski is co-founder, co-owner, and co-editor of Beauty School Editions, LLC. Her poetry collection, The Becoming Game, is forthcoming from Hanging Loose Press in spring of 2025. She is also the author of Quitter (Diode Editions Book Prize winner), The Threatened Everything , Ghost Fargo (Nightboat Poetry Prize winner, selected by Franz Wright), Upon Arrival, and several chapbooks, including the lyric prose Misplaced Sinister.
Cisewski's work has appeared in numerous literary journals, been featured on Verse Daily, and been included in the anthologies Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics, Rocked by the Waters: Poems of Motherhood, Rewilding: Poems for the Environment, Beyond the Frame, and New Poetry from the Midwest. She’s been awarded fellowships and residencies from organizations including the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Oberholtzer Foundation, and The Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts. Her poems have been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net.
Cisewski serves as poetry curator and board member for The Waves, a quarterly cabaret featuring poets and musicians performing a vibrant mix of astonishing, mysterious, beautiful new work. For several years she served as a reader and then as an associate editor of Conduit Magazine, Books, and Ephemera. Before that, she founded and curated Twin Cities' reading series including the open mic night at the Artists' Quarter Jazz Club, St. Paul Calls quarterly poetry & jazz series (with Fred Schmalz), the Imaginary Press Reading Series, the Banfill-Locke's 2013 Reading Series, and The Poetry Fort.
While raising her son, Cisewski earned her BA from St. Catherine's University and her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. During those years, she worked in warehouses, was a mosaic artist mentor, owned a coffee shop, and waited one million tables. She lives in Minneapolis, where she has for two decades taught writing privately and academically. She makes visual things at Yew Who Studio.
In another life, Haley Lasché designed Scantron sheets by day, modeled punk fashion at night and taught yoga on the weekends while not-so-secretly loving every word she heard or read. She graduated with an MFA in Writing from Hamline University where she edited poetry for The Water~Stone Review and edited and co-founded rock.paper.scissors. She was a board member at Red Bird Chapbook for a while too where she briefly edited their Weekly Reads.
Now, she is the co-founder, co-owner, and co-editor of Beauty School Editions, LLC and founder and editor of Concision Poetry Journal. She teaches at Century College and North Hennepin Community College where she is the faculty editor of their literary magazine, Under Construction. She also quietly sometimes still teaches yoga.
Her poems have appeared such places as Landlocked Magazine, New Note Poetry and Nice Cage. She has two poetry chapbooks: Where It Leads (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016) and Blood and Survivor (Locofo Chaps, 2017). Her first full-length collection One is Beauty School Editions's first glorious publication. She can't wait for you to read their second.
