​L.I. Henley was born and raised in the Mojave Desert of California where she lived for most of her life. An interdisciplinary artist and writer, her books include Starshine Road (Perugia Press Prize, 2018), the novella-in-verse, Whole Night Through, and These Friends These Rooms (Big Yes Press, 2014). Her poetry chapbooks include Desert with a Cabin View, The Finding, From the Moon as I Fell with artist Zara Kand, Ordinary Light with Laura Maher, and most recently, Dear Question: A Conversation written with Jennifer K. Sweeney. Her unpublished chapbook “Dream of the Rifle” written with Kristin Bock was a finalist for Sixth Finch’s chapbook contest. Her poetry can be found at Zone 3, The Diagram, Rhino, Tupelo Quarterly, Diode, Waxwing, and elsewhere. 

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Her essays on pain, illness, and the Mojave Desert have won the Arts & Letters/Susan Atefat Prize, the Robert and Adele Schiff Award, the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award, and Terrain.org’s 15th annual nonfiction prize. Henley’s essays were also finalists for several awards including the Louise Cranston Memorial Prize, the Margarita Donnelly Prize, The Ned Stuckey French Award, and The Tucson Festival of Books. Her currently unpublished essay collection “Dispatches from the Ridge: Love, Illness, and the Mojave Badlands” was a finalist for the Autumn House Publishing Prize. “A Blur on the Spine,” originally published by Southern Humanities Review, is a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2024. 

 

You can also find her visual narrative artworks at The Paris Collage Collective, Kolaj, Candyfloss, Waxwing, Adroit, The Diagram, The Indianapolis Review, Action/Spectacle and elsewhere. For a profile of her paper dolls, check out award-winning fiction writer Bess Winter’s interview with Henley at The Cincinnati Review. 

 

Henley now resides on the central coast with her husband and two dogs. She teaches in the English department at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, creates visual reviews of favorite books, and always has something in progress on her art table. She wants you to know that she’s been using the m-dash since 1999 and she has no plans of stopping.