Lyn Coffin

Biography

While a student in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she won Major and Minor Hopwood Awards in every category. She was later Associate Editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review and taught English at the University of Washington, (Department of Continuing Education), Renton High School through WITS (Writers in the School), the University of Michigan, the (University of Michigan) Residential College, Detroit University, MIAD (Milwaukee Institute of Arts and Design), University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Ilia State University, Tbilisi, Georgia, Jih High School, Marianske Lazne, Czechoslovakia, and Mando Technical Institute, as well as Council House www.councilhouse.org, and The Summit at Capitol Hill.

Coffin is the author of twenty-one books of poetry, fiction, drama, nonfiction, and translation. She has published fiction, poetry and non-fiction in over fifty quarterlies and small magazines, including Catholic Digest and Time magazine. One of her fictions, originally published in the Michigan Quarterly Review appeared in Best American Short Stories 1979, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Her plays have been performed at theaters in Malaysia, Singapore, Boston, New York (Off Off Broadway), Detroit, Ann Arbor, and Seattle. She has given poetry readings with Nobel Prize winners Joseph Brodsky and Czesław Miłosz, and Philip Levine, among others. She is a member of Washington Poets’ Association and Poets West and Greenwood Poets. Coffin's latest book is a translation of Shota Rustaveli’s The Knight in the Panther Skin, a 12th-century epic poem from the country of Georgia. It has been largely unknown to English-speaking audiences because few translations have been produced. Coffin was awarded the Georgian National Literature Prize in 2016 [1]

"Coffin may be the most accomplished writer most Americans have never heard of." -Iron Twine Press: Seattle Poet Offers Epic 800 Years in the Making