Karen Holmberg

Karen Holmberg’s teaching and research interests include creative nonfiction and the lyric essay, translation, the intersections of poetry and science, and letterpress printing and the poetics of visual space. Her first book, The Perseids, won the Vassar Miller Prize and was published by the University of North Texas Press; her second book, Axis Mundi, is the latest winner of the John Ciardi Prize and will be published by BkMk Press in 2012. Individual poems have appeared in such magazines as The Paris Review, Quarterly West, Slate, The Nation, Cimarron Review, Southern Poetry Review, Cave Wall, Nimrod, Subtropics, and have won her a Discovery/The Nation Award. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Black Warrior Review. She holds an MA in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Southern California, the MFA in poetry from the University of California-Irvine, and the PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri. Her current writing project is a lyric novella/hybrid work based on a family history of emigration and orchard keeping.