Lisa Rosenberg is a poet, essayist, and former space program engineer trained as a physicist. She served as the second Poet Laureate of San Mateo County (2017-2018), and is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Leonardo@Djerassi Residency, and honors for her books Weeds and Stars (2026, The Word Works) and A Different Physics (2018, Red Mountain Press), which reflect decades of polydisciplinary inquiry across poetry, science, engineering, and somatic practice.
As laureate of a diverse Bay Area county and tech hub, Rosenberg created performance and educational opportunities in poetry and STEAM, presenting at scientific venues, schools, and maker spaces. Her community project, Spoken Art, curated local visual art to prompt hundreds of original ekphrastic poems from residents of all ages across the county. In her emerita capacity, she has offered numerous public programs and presentations, instructed incarcerated writers, and coached teens in recitation for Poetry Out Loud competitions. Since 2019, her talks, workshops, and essays emphasize process and systems skills essential to integrative and ecological thinking. She has engaged specialist and generalist audiences alike at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Chabot Planetarium, festivals, conferences, and educational forums. Throughout, she strives to make the resources of poetry—her sustaining practice and lab—accessible to the widest possible audience.
Rosenberg’s writing stems from lifelong engagement with systems and design, in a career of concurrent work across multiple fields. Her artistic process has been shaped by mentors in poetry and elsewhere, including Eavan Boland and Derek Walcott, and master teachers in Aikido, dance, and Feldenkrais. She has studied fine and performing arts since childhood, and grew up with a home machine shop and deep family ties to the arts, aviation, and early NASA/JPL lunar missions. She began studying both poetry and physics in adolescence, earning a private pilot’s license at eighteen, and later a B.S. in physics from U.C. Davis and an M.A. in creative writing from Boston University. In her nearly thirty years in science and technology, she has worked as an engineer on satellite programs including the International Space Station, and established a consulting practice in product development and strategy. She built a parallel consulting practice in multi-use landscape design, combining technical and artistic expertise. In the early 2000s, she began somatic studies as a student in Aikido and as a practitioner in the Feldenkrais Method, both of which have deepened her approach to systems perception and process fluency.
Former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky has praised Rosenberg’s poetry for its “informed vision that is social as well as scientific, personal as well as historical.” Through varied traditional and open forms, her poems explore nature, culture, interconnectedness, and how patterns recur across domains, often enacting scientific thinking in structure and mode, independent of theme, a process she discusses in craft talks and poetics essays. Rosenberg has also published essays in memoir, science, satire, and reflections on living part-time in rural Greece, as her extended family now spans two continents, languages, and religions. Her literary publications include The Common, POETRY, Plume, Terrain.org, The Threepenny Review, Witness, Leonardo/MIT, periodicities, and many anthologies.
www.Lisarosenberg.com
IG: @lisarosenbergwrites