about the author

Karen Holman is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she earned her MFA in Poetry. At Iowa she served as an editor of Iowa Woman. A native of California, she now works in Detroit as a social worker and an advocate for people with severe mental illness. She attended AWP as an invited speaker for POOL magazine, which publishes her work. Her poetry has also appeared in Sentence, Berkeley Poetry Review, Portland Review and Yellow Silk, among others. Her fiction was published in Gargoyle. Her work has also aired over NPR as part of the Iowa Radio Project. Her chapbook, Welcoming in the Starry Night of the Lightning Bees, is featured in the fourth volume of the emerging poets’ series, New Poets, Short Books, ed. by Marvin Bell and published by Lost Horse Press this year. In 2009, she was chosen as a Finalist in the Saint Lawrence Book Award for her poetry book, Incandescent House.