Welcome to Anna Leahy's website. You can find basic information here.

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

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

NEWS

Anna 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 is forthcoming in The Pinch, and a third essay was a finalist in the Arts & Letters competition last year. These pieces are part of a book project called Proving Ground: A Cold War Memoir.

Anna's short story "Look for Me" was published by Fifth Wednesday last year.

Two of Anna's essays about writing ("Online Presence" and "The Excitement of Influence") are included in the forthcomingWomen and Poetry: Tips on Writing, Revising, Publishing and Teaching.

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.

Anna has poems in recent issues of Laurel Review, Barn Owl Review, Margie, Crab Orchard Review, Cream City Review, Eclipse, and Oberon. Her poems appear or are forthcoming 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.

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?.