Anna Journey


Anna Journey is an American poet and essayist who was awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. She is the author of the essay collection, An Arrangement of Skin and three books of poems: The Atheist Wore Goat Silk, Vulgar Remedies, and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, the latter of which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California, where she is an assistant professor of English.

Life

She graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University, with an MFA in creative writing.
She taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, and served as an associate editor for Blackbird. She earned her Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston, where she served as a poetry editor for Gulf Coast.
Journey is the author of the poetry collection, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. Film director David Lynch called her book, via Twitter, "magical." Her poetry appears in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, FIELD, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, and Blackbird.
Her critical essay on Sylvia Plath appears in Notes on Contemporary Literature. Her essay, "Lost Vocabularies: On Contemporary Elegy" appears in Parnassus: Poetry In Review." In 2006, Journey discovered the unpublished status of Plath's early sonnet "Ennui" that was published in Blackbird.
She is married to poet David St. John and lives in Venice, California.

Awards

Criticism

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Reviews

Anna Journey's first book of poems, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, is a deeply American debut that deals with the author's Southern childhood and adolescence as a pretty, redheaded girl from the bayou. It's lush with Romanticism: Journey writes with near-perfect pitch about flowers, the suburban eeriness of garden centers, her closeted gay psychiatrist grandfather and the mother who broke her back.