Tess Lockhart is poet theologian who sees God at work everywhere. The creative Word demands to be spoken, and she answered the call to bear witness to that elusive Word with the offering of her own exploratory words that invite us to join the search party as the frail, broken creatures that we all are.  "I am Jacob, wrestling," she says, "Jonah, pouting; a psalmist ranting before humbled into praise; the Samaritan woman at the well, questioning; Peter, betraying then falling down grateful for forgiveness.  In all, I am hopelessly caught up in Divine Love even as I struggle like a cat to be let down to scamper off to find my own trouble." 

Growing up mostly in Appalachia, she started out wanting to be an English professor devoted to Milton, English Renaissance drama, and poetry.  Her influences have included a variety of classical and modern poets, Christian liturgy, and biblical poets.  She was teaching endless sections of required introductory English classes in literature and composition when  she discerned a call to ordained ministry, leaving teaching to attend seminary.  Upon ordination, she served as a pastor of various churches, then earned a Ph.D. in theology at Vanderbilt.   As a member of a seminary faculty, she taught preaching and worship to future pastors before leaving full-time academia to do theology, write liturgy, and coach preachers for her mainline Protestant  denomination's national office.  Today,  she still promiscuously preaches around and teaches theology as an adjunct.  

She has been writing poetry since she was ten.  Since her mother went into labor with her while her father was studying Robert Browning, whose birthday she shares, her parents simply assumed she'd grow up to be a poet.  However, because she's been an academic theologian for most of her career, her published works are mostly sermons, liturgies, and academic theological works read by a handful of fellow theologians.  She continued  to write poetry that she likens to medieval Popes' children hidden away in whispered rumors.  But now it seems they've taken to trying to sell their stories to potential publishers, which is to say: she's begun submitting poems for publication.  She's had a few poems published in the last four publications of Ohio Bards Poetry Anthology and has a poem in a publication dedicated to the 2024 victims of North Carolina's storm victims, Bards of the Storm.  She's also had poems published in various editions of  The Soliloquy Journal, and Sextet in Glasgow.  She won a 2025 Bermuda Triangle Poetry Prize.   

Days after turning 51, her husband of 30 years died of a heart attack in her arms. Some of her poetry expresses frustration with this complicated first marriage and its sudden loss.  When she remarried later, she began to know first-hand the wonders of redemptive incarnate love. 

With this new marriage,  she  basically retired from full-time church service and studied anatomy and medical massage, opening her own business as a licensed massage therapist in order to help heal this world’s many traumas, including her own that seem to be connected to the chronic pain she's lived with since the age of sixteen.  Her poetry reflects her fascination with transcendence in immanence and how spirit and matter co-mingle.

Now residing in Cincinnati, she enjoys keeping up with her two children and four step-children and her six grandchildren.   "My journey has taken some strange turns," she laughs.  "Hopefully some of the things I’ve learned might be of value to others and encourage them, like the biblical Jacob, to keep wrestling for a blessing."