Anya Achtenberg

Anya Achtenberg is author of the novel Blue Earth and novella The Stories of Devil-Girl (both, Modern History Press); and poetry books, The Stone of Language (West End Press); and I Know What the Small Girl Knew (Holy Cow! Press). Her poetry awards include first prizes from Southern Poetry Review and Another Chicago Magazine; her fiction has received awards from Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story, New Letters, the Raymond Carver Story Contest, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and others. Anya is working to complete History Artist, a novel centering in a Cambodian woman born at the moment the U.S. bombing began. She teaches creative writing workshops around the U.S. and online, and is a manuscript consultant. Current projects include a poetry chapbook, Matadors at the Crossing; a book on her multi-genre Writing for Social Change workshops; essays on the relationship between trauma and narration; and nonfiction work on Cuba. Anya organizes arts-focused and multicultural journeys to Cuba.

Anya has taught extensively: multicultural and global literature and varied forms of writing, in many areas of the country and at all levels. She has taught many professional and emerging writers, graduate and undergraduate students, at-risk/drop-out young adults and public school students, refugees, ex-addicts and ex-inmates, health care educators, pregnant teens, ESL students, and colleagues needing assistance in expanding their curriculum and in working with diverse and “non-traditional students.”

She currently teaches creative writing workshops and classes around the country and online with growing international participation, and offers manuscript consultations and coaching for fiction writers, memoirists and poets, many of whom go on to publish and to win literary prizes. Her most recent new workshop/course is Body Stories, Body Song, and the Elements of Story Craft--she is seeking time to write this powerful course into a book available at-large.

Along with her numerous fiction and memoir workshops, she developed and teaches a series of multi-genre workshops on Writing for Social Change (Re-Dream a Just World; Place and Exile/Borders and Crossings; and Yearning and Justice: Writing the Unlived Life; Writing IS/AS Resistance), which she has started writing into a movable workshop; these focus on reframing and recontextualizing the craft and concepts of creative writing, and she has taught them in many settings around the country, including conferences on overcoming racism. She continues to do workshops and classes as a visiting writer to various colleges and universities, and develop new courses and workshops. She has read and performed her work widely.