Anna Journey

Anna Journey (born November 1980 in Arlington, Virginia) is an American poet who was recently awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. She is the author of two collections of poetry: If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series, and Vulgar Remedies (Louisiana State University Press, 2013). 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 received 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 (Georgia, 2009), 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 ("'Dragon Goes to Bed With Princess': F. Scott Fitzgerald's Influence 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 In 2006, Journey discovered the unpublished status of Plath's early sonnet "Ennui" that was published in Blackbird.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 the poet David St. John and lives in Venice, California.

Awards

 * 2005 Sycamore Review Wabash Prize for Poetry
 * Yaddo residency
 * 2005 Wabash Prize for Poetry
 * Academy of American Poets' Prize
 * 2007 Diner Poetry Contest
 * 2008 National Poetry Series
 * 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry

Criticism

 * "Review: The World in Repair: Steve Gehrke's The Pyramids of Malpighi", Blackbird, Spring 2005
 * "Dragon Goes to Bed with Princess: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Influence on Sylvia Plath", Notes on Contemporary Literature, 09/01/07

Reviews
"Anna Journey's first book of poems, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press: 104 pp., $16.95 paper), 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."