INTRODUCTION
Nancy Lynée Woo is a poet, imagination enthusiast, and eco-activist who harbors a wild love for the natural world. Her debut poetry collection is I’d Rather Be Lightning (GASHER Press, 2023). Nancy was a 2023-24 recipient of the California Creative Corps grant and a 2015 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow. She has received fellowships and grants from Artists at Work, Arts Council for Long Beach, California Center for the Book, Idyllwild Writers Week, Plympton Writing Downtown, and Literary Women. Her work has been published in Salamander, The Shore, Tupelo Quarterly, Stirring, Radar Poetry, and others. She is currently the Long Beach Youth Poet Laureate Fellow with the Long Beach Public Library, and enjoys mentoring a cohort of teen poets.
Nancy is the founder of the community-based poetry space Surprise the Line. She believes in the power of the arts to bring people together. Her degrees are in sociology and creative writing from UC Santa Cruz and Antioch University LA. Find her cavorting around Long Beach (Tongva land) in California, and on social media @fancifulnance.
EXTENDED BIO
Nancy was awarded a writing residency with the Writing Downtown Las Vegas Writer’s Block to work on completing her second book in August 2024. She is currently the 2024-25 Youth Poet Laureate Fellow with the Long Beach Public Library. She works closely with the library and the teen center to design, produce, and support programming for the cohort of teen poets, including teaching craft lessons, facilitating feedback workshops, and guiding their professional development as writers.
Nancy was a recipient of the 2023-24 California Creative Corps grant, a program funded by the California Arts Council that paired artists with non-profits to create public arts programming around key topics, such as climate change and social justice. Nancy partnered with the nonprofit LA River Arts to lead three outdoor poetry activities along the LA River, culminating in a community-based public performance called “Reflections: How Does It Feel?” which featured 17 local performing artists. She also produced a 16-page color zine featuring 30 local writers and artists on the topics of ecology, climate change, and the Los Angeles River, also known as Paayme Paxaayt to the Tongva people.
Nancy’s debut, full-length poetry collection, I’d Rather Be Lightning, was published by GASHER Press in March 2023. She had previously published two chapbooks, Bearing the Juice of It All (Finishing Line Press, 2016) and Rampant (Sadie Girl Press, 2014). Her third (unpublished) chapbook, Good Darkness, was named a Semi-Finalist in the Sunken Garden chapbook contest with Tupelo Press in 2021.
Nancy was selected as a 2022-2023 Artist at Work with THE OFFICE performing arts + culture. This was a program designed to get artists back to work after the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic. She spent the year leading community programming including after-school poetry class, a cooking and writing workshop, a virtual poetry workshop, and Poems & Produce in the Wilmington community garden. This residency culminated in an art exhibit featuring her work at Angels Gate Cultural Center in December 2022. Nancy concurrently completed her MFA in creative writing from Antioch University.
Since 2017, Nancy has been offering community poetry workshops through her organization Surprise the Line. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, Nancy was spurred into action and quickly pivoted to teaching her Surprise the Line poetry classes on Zoom. She led a donation-based writing workshop called Rise & Shine for 3 months and created a space for the literary community and beyond to come together and find solace and companionship while sheltering in place.
Nancy has had poems on display in the Billie Jean King Main Library in Long Beach, Calif., as a part of the “Between the Divide” exhibition for 2019-2020 Professional Artist Fellows. She has also had her poems on display in the Ruth B. Shannon Art Gallery in Whittier, Calif., as a part of a multi-media project, “Bridges.” She was selected as an Idyllwild Writers Week Fellow in 2019.
Pre-pandemic, Nancy was sharing her love of poetry with 5th grade classrooms as an artist-teacher with Angels Gate Cultural Center. In 2018, she received a grant from the California Center for the Book to organize Community Conversations About the Arts with the Long Beach Public Library. She was also writing a literary events column for the Long Beach Post called “What’s Lit.”
Nancy was selected as a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow in 2015. In 2014, she collaborated on a poetry and music project called Face the Blaze with Blacksheep Music Productions. She also produced two anthologies on social justice topics through her small press project called Lucid Moose Lit.
Nancy has performed poetry in diverse venues, from barber shops to pizza parlors to college campuses to art museums. She has had poems published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Radar Poetry, Confrontation Magazine, The Rusty Toque, and Stirring.
Alongside her work in the literary world, Nancy has completed Council I training for facilitators with the Center for Council. In 2021, she completed the Climate Corps Reality Training and served as the hub coordinator for Sunrise Long Beach from 2022-23. Over a decade of community activism, she has co-founded multiple nonprofit arts organizations, including the Long Beach Literary Arts Center.
Pre-pandemic, Nancy hosted a biannual reading series at the Long Beach Public Library, “Off the Page: The Story Behind the Stanzas.” She has been a guest speaker at Occidental College, OCSA, UCLA, Cal State Fullerton, Mt. San Antonio College, and others. She’s served as a guest poetry judge for the OCSA Poetry Slam, among others.
Nancy also works as a freelance writer and editor. She has a degree in sociology from UC Santa Cruz and lives in Long Beach, California. Her work is largely inspired by the magic and power of the natural world.
ARTIST STATEMENT
According to poet Robert Carr, “Poets repeat the same prayer in different words.” My prayer is: I wish to empower grace. I write to see what I can’t see yet, to experience perspectives beyond my own and stretch my understandings of the world. I agree with Robert Frost: "Being a poet is a condition." I’ve always loved cartwheeling with language and exploring consciousness through imagery.
I am fascinated by the tension between science and mysticism, body and spirit, masculine and feminine, modern technology and ancient mythologies, and mortality and collective consciousness. I strive for my poems to embrace the complexities of modern life while acknowledging the interconnectedness of humanity with plants, animals, and ecosystems. I write because putting words on a page is how I best know how to exist. The more I embrace the process, the wider the openings become.
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it—because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
—Howard Thurman