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ARAH KO
A poet, editor, teacher, and fiction writer, Arah Ko has work published or forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Palette Poetry, Colorado Review, Salt Hill, New Ohio Review, Nimrod, and elsewhere. Arah is the recipient of the 2022 Helen Earnhart Harley Creative Writing Fellowship Award in Poetry, selected by Tory Adkisson. In 2021, Arah was the winner of the Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize, judged by Matthew Olzmann, and in 2020 was the runner-up for Fugue's Poetry Contest, judged by sam sax.
Arah hails from Hawai'i and the Greater Chicago Area. Today she is an MFA candidate in creative writing at The Ohio State University in Columbus where she serves as Art Editor and Associate Poetry Editor for The Journal. A graduate of the Wheaton College English Honors program, Arah served as Editor-in-Chief for KODON, the college's septuagenarian literary magazine and winner of the 2017 AWP National Director's Prize for Design. She was the 2018 Luci Shaw Fellow for Image in Seattle, WA. She is a current Lilly Graduate Fellow.
“The poems in this manuscript grapple with the alarming indifference the natural world has toward matters of mortality while at the same time grappling with the subtle traumas and bittersweet truths inherent in family and memory. Loss of various kinds finds a lyrical voice in these poems, as "Around us is a constant / cadence, an ancient clinging, / almost a song," one that rings unmistakably doleful and meditatively in these works.”
― Tory Adkisson, author of The Flesh Between Us
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
"Procne, Swallowed" Sundog Lit, March 2023
"Origin Myth" Palette Poetry, January 2023
"Lazarus" New Ohio Review, December 2022
"Phantom Pain as Natal Philopatry" Salt Hill, November 2022
"Epistle of Eve" the winnow, November 2022
"Kumiho 구미호" Lantern Review, October 2022
"'God's Love is Very Loud' is a fascinating poem
that plays with the enjambed line to surprise
and mirror the speaker's complex relationship with faith."
―sam sax
Feel free to contact me with any inquiries. I'd love to share my experience with you and I'm always open to new opportunities.