Anita Olivia Koester
ABOUT
Anita Olivia Koester is a poet, editor, educator, and blogger originally from Chicago. She is the author of four chapbooks including Apples or Pomegranates (Porkbelly Press), Arrow Songs (Paper Nautilus Press) which won the Vella Chapbook Contest, and Marco Polo (Hermeneutic Chaos Press). Her first full length poetry manuscript has been a finalist for the Alice James Book Award, a runner-up for The Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press), as well as a semi-finalist for other contests.
She has been nominated numerous times for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Pleiades, The Florida Review, Mid-American Review, TriQuarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, The Journal, The Pinch, Muzzle Magazine and elsewhere. Her poems have won the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, The Baltimore Review's Prose Poetry Contest, So to Speak's Annual Poetry Contest, amongst others. Her writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, PLAYA, Vermont Studio Center, Hambidge, and SAFTA.
Anita received an MFA from the University of Virginia where she taught poetry and non-fiction writing, and a BFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. She has worked as an editor at several literary journals including Green Mountains Review.
Anita also is a book reviewer and blogger and creator of the blog Fork & Page which reviews poetry collections, read it- HERE
Besides being a writer, Anita is also an artist and photographer, her work is published in The Adroit Journal, SKY+SEA Anthology, Paris Lit Up, Photographer Forum’s Best of Photography and on the cover of a few chapbooks and books.
She tweets at- @anitaokoester and @forkandpage