With her husband, Douglas Dechow, Anna Leahy has spent two years following the end of the space shuttle program. Together, they write the blog Lofty Ambitions at http://loftyambitions.wordpress.com.
Anna teaches in the MFA and BFA programs at Chapman University and directs Tabula Poetica: The Center for Poetry at Chapman University. She edits TAB: The Journal of Poetry and Poetics, which launches January 2013.
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Anna and her husband, Doug, spent a writing residency at Ragdale in 2012 to work on their book Generation Space. They have since signed with literary agent Alice Tasman. They published an article about archives in Air & Space Magazine (August 2011), have a piece about small airports at Airplane Reading, and are blogging together and separately at The Huffington Post.
Anna's 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.
Anna was a Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference in 2011.
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.
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.
Anna's short story "Look for Me" was published by Fifth Wednesday in 2009, and she is working on a novel based on her grandfather's early life in an iron ore mining town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Read interviews with Anna at omoiyari and First Book Interviews.
Anna was 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.
Led by Stephanie Vanderslice and Anna, a group of creative writing professors blogs at The Huffington Post; see samples here and here. 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.
