In October 2016, the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors appointed Lisa Rosenberg of Menlo Park to the honorary post of Poet Laureate. She will serve a two-year term beginning on January 1, 2017.
Rosenberg is a “scientist poet” who holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from UC Davis, a master’s degree in creative writing from Boston University, and was a recipient of the Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry from Stanford University. Her writing appears in literary, technical and scientific venues; from poetry anthologies to journals as diverse as The Threepenny Review, POETRY, Shenandoah, Witness, and Semiconductor International.
The opportunity to work in the community as a poet, to talk about writing, and represent San Mateo County, is both an honor and a delight. Our County has many vibrant communities, and each of us represents a particular cross-section that only we can write from. I hope to help more voices become part of the literary conversation, and to extend that conversation beyond the spheres we think of as literary—because the artists, and the arts, of our region represent widely varied disciplines and backgrounds.