Biography

Raised on the Great Plains of Oklahoma and currently at home on the Front Range of Colorado, Lydia Renfro is a place-based writer focused on regionality and setting as character in her work. Lydia received her BA in Creative Writing and Literature from Colorado State University, and went on to earn an MFA from Adelphi University where she was the recipient of the Donald Everett Axinn Award for Fiction.

 

She began her career in short form, publishing poetry and short fiction in journals such as Litro Magazine USA, The Brussels Review, Penelle Magazine, Red Fern Review, Siblini Journal, Miletus International Literature Magazine, and others, as well as in anthologies Level Land: Poems For and About the I35 Corridor and All The Lives We've Ever Lived. She has become a frequent contributor to the adapted poetry anthology form in the podcast Okie Bookcast: Behind the Rain Audio Anthology of Oklahoma Poetry which champions voices of the American South-Central Region. 

 

Lydia is transitioning to longer forms, with her debut chapbook collection Lung Deep Country available from MOONLOVE Press (2026). She is at work on her next project, a novel set in the prairie as a love letter to sisterhood and the land.