Lynette Thrower is a poet and short story writer living in Fort Smith, AR. Her work has appeared in Applause Literary Journal and the Arkansas English Journal. One of her roles as a poet is to acknowledge, honor, and celebrate the humanity and life’s purpose of the under-celebrated, undervalued and forgotten. She is also committed to interrogating the “what if’s” and imagining the undocumented sides of conversations in her poetry.
Lynette is a 2018 grant recipient and member of the inaugural cohort of the Artists_360 project supported by the Mid-America Arts Alliance and the Walton Family Foundation. She is also an alumna of the 2019 Open Mouth Reading Series Retreat and a member of the 2020 Nick Cave Until artists convening and Poets Respond project in Northwest Arkansas. She has taught as a guest instructor on magic realism at the Write Now writers’ workshop at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and currently serves as a partner artist for the museum’s CB to You Mobile Art Lab. She has performed her poetry at venues such as The Momentary and the Levitt Amp Fort Smith Music Series and has participated in panel conversations such as Fort Smith’s 64/6 Downtown’s 2022 Our Town’s Excellence discussion on art in the River Valley. She holds a B.A. in English with a minor in Rhetoric and Writing from the University of Arkansas – Fort Smith and is employed there as Assistant to the Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management and Student Affairs.