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Lyman Grant was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and was raised there and in Temple, Texas. He has a B.S. from The University of Texas (1975) and an M.A. from Texas A&M (1979) and will complete his Ph.D. in 2008. He began working at ACC in 1978 as a tutor in the learning labs and as an adjunct teacher in developmental writing. From 1980 to 1988, he served as department chair of developmental writing on the Rio Grande Campus. From 1988 to 1992, he was the division chair of developmental education (reading, writing, math, study skills) for the Riverside, Southwest, and Pinnacle campuses. In 1993, he transferred to the English Department at the Riverside Campus. In 2004, he moved back to Rio Grande Campus as Professor of English and as Department Chair of Creative Writing. In the 1980s, Lyman focused his writing on prose, working mostly in critical essays and reviews, publishing over seventy-five pieces in The Dallas Morning News, The Texas Observer, Texas Books in Review, The Texas Humanist, Texas Parks and Wildlife, Journey, and the ACC publications The Grackle and Knackademics. From 1988 to 1992, he edited and published MAN! Magazine (co-created with Sharon Adams and John Lee), a newsstand quarterly focusing on men's issues and recovery. MAN! was cited as a "Best New Magazine of the Year" in 1988 by The Library Journal. In the mid-eighties, Lyman returned to his first love, poetry. Since then he has published poems in various journals (including Sulphur River Review, Concho River Review, The Texas Observer, Icarus, Enkidu, and Brazos River Review, Teaching English in the Two-year College, Indefinite Space, Prose Ax, Poetry Motel, Words of Wisdom, Angel Face, Windhover, Pikeville Review, Visions International and Timber Creek Review) and anthologies (including four Di-Verse-City anthologies, two issues of the Houston Poetry Festival, Feeding the Crow, Best Texas Writing I, Is This Forever, or What?). He has published one volume of poetry, Text and Commentary (Mandala, 1993) and has a second, The Road Home , will be published in the fall 2006 by Dalton Publishing.

Lyman has published one work of memoir, "Recovering from a Good Mother," included in Through the Fire (Crossings Press, 1993). He has edited The Letters of Roy Bedichek (The University of Texas Press, 1985), New Growth: Contemporary Short Fiction by Texas Writers (Corona, 1989), Short Fiction: Classic and Contemporary (5th and 6th editions, Prentice Hall, 2001 and 2005), and is in the process of editing Confronting Contemporary Cultures: A Reader with Lennis Polnac (McGraw Hill, 2006). With Lennis Polnac and Tom Cameron, Lyman wrote CommonSense: A Handbook and Guide for Writers (Prentice Hall, 1999, and McGraw Hill, 2003). Lyman has served as Book Review Editor and columnist of The Texas Humanist (now Texas Journal, published by the Texas Commission of the Humanities), Editor and Publisher of MAN! Magazine, Fiction Editor of Brazos River Review, Assistant to the Managing Editor of Callaloo: Literary and Arts Journal of the African Diaspora, and now edits ACC's student literary and arts journal, The Rio Review.

FromTres Di-Verse-City, Anthology of the Austin International Poetry Festival, edited by Scott Wiggerman.

Black Bowl With Apples on Old Table Cloth (1995)

I have placed a bowl of apples
in the center of the table,
an iron bowl, black and strong, its legs
curled under like snakes about to
strike. I have placed the bowl upon
a cotton table cloth that my
sisters made sure was mine when our
mother died. It's white, with yellow
roses bordered by broad red stripes.
I've kept it all these years, I find,
so I could set a place for you--
the black bowl, yellow roses, red
stripes, apples the color of spring.
This time I will pick the fruit.

It will be crisp and cool and tart,
and with our sharpest knife, I will
sever skin from meat in perfect
empty circles, like rings, like mouths,
like the moan between your open
legs and we will eat this naked,
skinless fruit together, lips to
lips, teeth and tongue biting, chewing,
licking juices from mouth and fruit
and mouth not knowing which or who,
mingling, merging, urging into
the other, the three of us one,
you, me, and the promise of fruit,
all gifts of sisters and mothers.