Lisa Vihos + Sunset Park
Lisa Vihos
Lisa received her BA in Art History from Vassar College and an MA in Art History from the University of Michigan. She spent more than two decades as an art museum educator, helping people of all ages recognize their own creativity and the transformative power of art. She is an award-winning poet with two Pushcart Prize nominations, and numerous awards from the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters, as well as the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and was the 2023 winner of the Hal Prize.
She has published five chapbooks, her most recent being Sheboygan Occasions (Lone Snake Editions, 2025) which chronicles her time as Sheboygan’s first poet laureate (2020 to 2025). As well, she is the author of 5-7-5: a daily haiku journal (2024) and a historical novel, The Lone Snake: The Story of Sofonisba Anguissola (Water’s Edge Press, 2022). Lisa has long blended her interests in visual art, poetry, and public spaces to create venues in which people can share their voices through programs such as 100 Thousand Poets for Change, Poetic Pairings, and new in 2026, Words, Music, Connections, a collaborative open mic series at WordHaven BookHouse in downtown Sheboygan.
Visit Lisa’s website and poetry
www.lisavihos.com
This Partner Project
Community Stewardship: The Birth of Sunset Park
Lisa explored and sung the praises of Sunset Park, a small hidden gem below the bluff where North Avenue bends into 3rd Street. Her poetry project includes her own personal meditations on what it means to steward a small stretch of the lakefront, and resulted in a documentation through words and mixed media that she developed as the project unfolded.
Lisa created opportunities for community members of all ages to take in and ponder the inherent beauty in this special place. The culmination of this initial part of the community project created “Drifted Haiku” at Peace Park along the Lake Michigan shoreline, employing drift wood signage embedded in the earth that presented haiku created in workshops with high school students, seniors, and other members of the Sheboygan community.
May Each One Flow
From morning dew to evening rain,
water blesses the fields,
makes all things green.
Soil yearns for moisture
and by water’s touch
new life comes, prepares the harvest.
From silent spring to rushing stream
nutrients move, fish spawn,
and all is given.
Life is the river we carry unseen.
May each one flow to the great lake,
clear and clean.
First appeared in Sheboygan Insider, January 2023
Dear Water #1
The older I get,
the more like you
I become, vast
and unrelenting.
Less worry about
looks and praise,
less fear of death.
No stress, only
moving, absorbing
ebbing and flowing
tides in, tides out.
To rinse, to shed,
to make dry land fertile
so all seeds germinate.
This poem appeared in the summer 2022 issue of Bramble