Celisa Steele lives in Carrboro, North Carolina, where she served as the town’s poet laureate from 2013 to 2016. In 2011, Emrys Press published her first book of poems, How Language Is Lost, as the twelfth publication in its selective chapbook and poetry series, which began in 1995.

Ron Rash describes Celisa as “one of the Carolinas’ finest poets,” and Janice Moore Fuller calls her “a nimble metalinguist.” Anthony S. Abbott finds in How Language Is Lost “a delightful play of language, a sheer joy at how language is not lost, how language can take any experience and transform it into passion, into humor, into fresh and unusual insights into the seemingly ordinary experiences of life.”

Read more about How Language Is Lost.