Liza Sparks (she/her) is an intersectional feminist, writer, poet, and creative. Her work is informed by her intersecting identities as a brown-multiracial-neurodivergent-pansexual-woman. Liza was a student in the 2025-2026 Poetry Collective at The Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, Colorado. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Allium, CALYX, TIMBER, Split This Rock, Pangyrus LitMag, The Pinch, and many others. She is a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net nominee. Liza has a forthcoming poetry chapbook with Gnashing Teeth Publishing in 2027. You can find more of her work or connect with Liza on IG @sparksliza534, Blue Sky @lsparks, or on her website, lizasparks.com.
PRAISE:
Liza Sparks’s Hard Rain is poetic petrichor, heat reprieve, the perfect time and place to cuddle up with a book, this book. It’s raining dogs, dinosaurs, sharks, planes, and cars, and it’s crying wasps. Hard, as in not always easy, not always soft– like work, like family, like living. Hard rain, the kind that teaches the seasons of emotions, the weathers of pleasures, and how much pain a storm can sustain. Hard reins, the kind that harness power and hold it back. Hard reigns that pressure us to question and answer what really matters? Readers are given permission to deposit our rain checks in the river banks, to withdraw as we need, and also, when ready, to soak in all the drizzle, to awe at all that has sprouted. Sparks’ writing delights in making mundane magical and ordinary ornate. These poems are soul-searching, body-exploring, and curiously questioning. Sparks’s tender lens witnessing the world around her reminds us, too, of the wonders that are shimmering latent around us among and beyond the tumult of tempests and torrents.
–Aerik Francis, Adams County Poet Laureate and author of Bodypolitic and Miseducation…This book–so concerned with what can be kept, if anything–left me with images that lingered long and linger still. A dead son eating a peeled lemon, whole; pretend ice, then real ice melting in a pan; a grandmother turned hummingbird, migrating. A few poems speak to coveting others’ memories. In one of them, two friends press their noses into the bark of a tree that sheds its skin every hundred years. I want that friendship, the tree. And that’s the trick of poetry that feels this true: here’s my face, even as I write, pressed up against bark. Remembering my grandmother’s crocheted blanket. Wanting to photograph the moon. Her poems showcase moments that shift into new forms when placed just so. Daguerreotypical, they press hard against tender. I’d forgotten lines could be so short and effective, breaks turning an “I don’t know” into a “what it is” with a flick of the eye. And what it is could be gift or theft: what matters is the view we take of it. How what we make of it makes us.
–Stina French, host and founding editor of Listen To Your Skin Event & Press.
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