Photo Credit: Kathy Fagan
ABOUT ARAH
Arah Ko is a writer from Hawai'i with work published in over 50 journals.
She is the author of Brine Orchid (YesYes Books 2025) and the chapbook Animal Logic (Bull City Press 2026). Arah received her M.F.A. in creative writing at the Ohio State University in Columbus in 2023 where she served as Art, Wheeler Prize, and Associate Poetry Editor for The Journal. She is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Cincinnati and serves as an editorial assistant for The Cincinnati Review.
Arah has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of Net, and Best New Poets. Her prose appears in the Eastover Anthology of Rural Writers of Colors, 2024. She is runner-up for the 2024 Northwest Review Poetry Contest judged by Major Jackson, the winner of the 2023 Arthur Rense Prize through the Academy of American Poets, selected by Shelley Wong, the 2022 Helen Earnhart Harley Creative Writing Fellowship Award in Poetry, awarded by Tory Adkisson, Ruminate's 2021 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize, selected by Matthew Olzmann, a finalist for Fugue's 2023 prize and Indiana Review's 2022 Poetry Contest, and the runner-up for the Fugue 2020 Poetry Prize, judged by sam sax.
She was the 2018 Luci Shaw Fellow with Image in Seattle, WA and was a Lilly Graduate Fellow. She is currently an Albert C. Yates Fellow at UC and a cohort member of the Christian Poetics Initiative through the Rivendell Institute.
Her debut manuscript, Brine Orchid, was advised by Kathy Fagan and is forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2025. It circles themes of inheritance, myth, and family. Her chapbook Animal Logic explores themes of survival, consumption, and relationships through the lens of flora and fauna and is forthcoming from Bull City Press in 2026.
A graduate of the Wheaton College English Honors program, Arah served as Editor-in-Chief for the KODON, the college's 74-year-old literary magazine and winner of the 2017 AWP National Director's Prize for Design.
Arah studied under poet and professor Miho Nonaka, the author of Museum of Small Bones, and completed an honors portfolio under her tutelage entitled Metamorphoseon. While a student, she regularly entered writing competitions and was the three-time first-place recipient of the annual Lowell-Grabill Writing Contest judged by guest writers including Marie Howe and Rachel Arndt.
Growing up in Hawai'i, surrounded by jungle and books, Arah found inspiration in the rich and diverse mythological narrative of the islands, her Korean-American heritage, and traditional fairytales which continue to inspire her today. Look for glimpses of Ovid, Grimm, and the Old Testament in her recent projects.