Welcome to Anna Leahy's website.

Anna Leahy co-writes the blog Lofty Ambitions with Doug Dechow at http://loftyambitions.wordpress.com.

Anna directs Tabula Poetica: The Center for Poetry at Chapman University at http://www.chapman.edu/poetry.

NEWS                                       (Anna with grandfather, Henry Cullen)

Anna had a writing residency at Ragdale in 2012 and was a Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference in 2011.

Anna's creative nonfiction "Strange Attraction: John Wayne and Me" appears in The Southern Review (Spring 2011), another memoir piece entitled "Half-Skull Days" appears in The Pinch (Spring 2012), and a third essay was a finalist in the Arts & Letters contest. These pieces are part of a book project called Proving Ground: A Cold War Memoir.

Anna's poems appear in recent issues of Laurel Review, Barn Owl Review, Margie, Crab Orchard Review, Cream City Review, Eclipse, Oberon, and Post Road and in the anthologies A Face to Meet the Face, City of Big Shoulders: An Anthology of Poems about Chicago, Becoming: What Makes a Woman, and Don't Blame the Ugly Mug.

Led by Stephanie Vanderslice and Anna, a group of creative writing professors blogs at The Huffington Post; see samples here and here. Two of Anna's essays about writing ("Online Presence" and "The Excitement of Influence") are included in Women and Poetry: Tips on Writing, Revising, Publishing and Teaching. With Douglas Dechow, Anna published a short article about archives in Air & Space Magazine (August 2011).

Anna is the keynote speaker at the Midwest Graduate Student Conference "Radical Writes: Composition, Creative Writing, and New Media" at Southeast Missouri State University in 2012. She and Debora Rindge gave the keynote address at the Sigma Tau Delta Western Regional Conference in 2011. With Douglas Dechow, Anna presented at the "New Media in the Past Tense" series at The Huntington Library in 2011.

Anna's short story "Look for Me" was published by Fifth Wednesday in 2009, and she now serves in an advisory role for the journal.

Chapman University commissioned the poem "To find, to create, to remake" to celebrate its 150th anniversary. Anna read her poem in a program also featuring violinist Jack Lieback and Representative Loretta Sanchez. See the video here; Anna's reading is about 45 minutes in. Anna gave the university's annual "Aims of Education" address at opening convocation in August 2011.

Read interviews with Anna at omoiyari and First Book Interviews.

A conversation essay among Anna, Cathy Day, and Stephanie Vanderslice appears at Fiction Writers Review. It's about teaching and where creative writing as a field might go next. Click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2. The essay is also available as a pdf at the National Writing Project here and here.

Anna's essay "Teaching as a Creative Act" appears in the new collection Does the Writing Workshop Still Work?.