Poet and editor Andrea Carter Brown is the author of three previous poetry collections: The Disheveled Bed (CavanKerry Press, 2006) and two chapbooks, Brook & Rainbow (winner of the 2001 Sow’s Ear Poetry Review chapbook contest) and Domestic Karma, (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her current manuscript, American Fraktur, was chosen by Jane Hirshfield for the 2018 Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award from Marsh Hawk Press.
Her poetry has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Five Points, River Styx, Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and Miramar, among many others. Featured on Poetry Daily, her work has also won awards from The River Oak Review, Thin Air, and the Poetry Society of America.
She has given workshops, spoken publicly, and blogged about “The Poetry of Bearing Witness,” “History into Verse,” “The Legacy of 9/11 in Poetry,” “Finding the Perfect Form: Breaking Old Forms and Inventing New Ones,” and “How to Know When a Poem is (Finally) Finished.” She has interviewed Marilyn Hacker and Mark Doty for Five Points and has written articles about the poets Mona Van Duyn and M. L. Rosenthal.
Brown has been awarded fellowships at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, and VCCA. Most recently, she has twice been a Fellow at le Moulin à Nef in Auvillar, France. She has given readings in England, France, and throughout the United States.
Born in Paterson, New Jersey, and educated at New York University, Université de Paris, and City College, she lived in New York City until 2004, where she worked as an accountant for artists and small creative businesses and was a founding editor of the poetry journal Barrow Street. She taught creative writing at Pomona College after moving to the West Coast and was Managing Editor of The Emily Dickinson Journal. For six years she served on the Fellows Council of VCCA, the last three as Chair, and edited the poetry anthology Entering the Real World: VCCA Poets on Mt. San Angelo with Margaret B. Ingraham. In 2017, she joined The Word Works and serves as Series Editor for The Washington Prize, their longest-running poetry book contest and imprint.
Portrait by Thomas Drescher
