Start with a Small Guitar

A poet and attorney born in Los Angeles, Lynne Thompson served as Poet Laureate of the City of Los Angeles from 2021 to 2022. Her first collection, Beg No Pardon (Perugia Press, 2007), won the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. She also wrote Start with a Small Guitar (What Books Press, 2013) and Fretwork (Marsh Hawk Press, 2019), winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. Her work appears in Best American Poetry 2020. The daughter of Caribbean immigrants, she serves on the boards of Cave Canem and the Los Angeles Review of Books and chairs the Board of Trustees at Scripps College.