Anna Journey

Anna Journey is an American poet and essayist. She’s the author of the poetry collections Vulgar Remedies (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. Her third book of poems, The Atheist Wore Goat Silk, is forthcoming from LSU Press in the spring of 2017, and her debut collection of essays, An Arrangement of Skin, is forthcoming from Counterpoint Press in early 2017.

Her poems have been published in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Blackbird, FIELD, The Kenyon Review, and The Southern Review. Her essays appear in AGNI, The Antioch Review, Catapult, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and Utne Reader, and her criticism appears in American Poetry Review, FIELD, Kenyon Review Online, Parnassus, and Plath Profiles. Journey has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Corporation of Yaddo, the National Endowment for the Arts, and elsewhere.

Having spent the first seven years of her life in South Asia—five in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and two in New Delhi, India—Journey came to the United States in the late 1980s and settled in Fairfax, Virginia. At eighteen, she moved to Richmond, Virginia, where she resided for eight years, studying ceramics as an undergraduate student and poetry as a graduate student, at VCU. For much of her time in Richmond, Journey lived across the street from Hollywood Cemetery: a sprawling, magnolia-filled graveyard, dating from the 1840s, which overlooks the James River.

Journey holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston, as well as a B.F.A. in Art Education and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, both from Virginia Commonwealth University. She lives in Venice, California with her husband, poet David St. John, and she teaches creative writing and literature as an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern California.