Winner of the 2018 Blue Light Book Award

Prartho Sereno is author of three previous poetry collections, including Elephant Raga, Call from Paris, and Causing a Stir: The Secret Lives & Loves of Kitchen Utensils (illustrated by the author). She served as Poet Laureate of Marin County, California, 2015--2017, has an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University and was awarded a Radio Disney Super Teacher Award for her 19-years' work as a California Poet in the Schools.

Prartho's poems are informed by many years living in a meditation community in India, but she also credits excursions into other art forms: counseling psychologist, mother of two, vegetarian cook, meditation instructor at Cornell University, book illustrator, and amateur singer-songwriter. Her life's ambition is to be a tour guide of the as-yet-unimagined, a tender of life's creative fires.

She lives a little north of the Golden Gate Bridge with a sweet man who takes her rowing on the bay.

2007 Washington Prize winner, a second edition. Song, incantation, and a disarming but everyday mysticism infuse the poems of Prartho Sereno. She creates a universe that is both exotic and familiar. Says Dorianne Laux, There is a spark and swing in these poems, a touch of the surreal, and a great gust of soul...a joy to read.

Winner of the 2014 Blue Lynx Prize

The poems in Elephant Raga are strange and lyrical stories, jokes, heart breaking truths, and existential meditations. Their amazing energy and freshness makes every page an adventure and a delight. This is poetry for everyone.

Prartho Sereno has made her home in a bamboo hut in India, a 150-year-old farmhouse in Maine, a spiritual community in Oregon, an uptown apartment in Southern California, and for the past 23 years, a funky upstairs duplex north of the Golden Gate Bridge, which she shares with her boat-rowing sweetheart. Along with painting & poetry Prartho has dabbled in such art forms as taxi driver, family therapist, Phys Ed instructor at Cornell University, housecleaner, single parent, head cook, amateur singer/song-writer, illustrator, and palm-reading psychic in various Catskill resorts.

Author of the award-winning collections Indian Rope Trick, Elephant Raga, and Call from Paris, and author/illustrator of the IPPY-winning gift book, Causing a Stir: The Secret Lives and Loves of Kitchen Utensils, Prartho's other published works include a poetry chapbook, Garden Sutra, a song/music/poetry CD, Salt, and a book of essays, Everyday Miracles: An A to Z Guide to the Simple Wonders of Life.

Poet Laureate Emerita of Marin County, California (2015-17), Prartho was awarded a 2005 Radio Disney Super Teacher award for her 22 years work as a Poet in the Schools, the Marin Poetry Center's inaugural Rilke Award (2023) for nurturing the poets, a Marin Arts Council Individual Artist Grant in Poetry (2003), and an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University (2013). She is founder of the ongoing poetry writing series: The Poetic Pilgrimage: Poem-Making as Spiritual Practice, now online.

The most dependable remark on Prartho's early report cards was Easily distracted and distracts others.-a comment she has done her best to live up to.