School of Writing, Literature, and Film

Karen Holmberg writes poetry, creative nonfiction, and young adult fiction that is strongly rooted in her love of the natural world. Her 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, was the winner of the John Ciardi Prize and was published by BkMk Press in 2013. Slate Magazine named Axis Mundi one of the ten best poetry titles of 2013. 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, New England Review, and Indiana Review; two of her essays have been cited as Notable Essays in Best American Essays (2012 and 2013). 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 project, entitled A: An Afterlife, is set in Puritan New England and tells the afterstory of Hawthorne's Hester Prynne and Asha, an outcast young woman with a vision for female self-defense.