Sara Pirkle is a Southern poet, an identical twin, a breast cancer survivor, and a board game enthusiast. Her first full-length collection of poetry, The Disappearing Act, won the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry and was published by Mercer University Press in 2018. In 2019, she was nominated for Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry, and in 2022 she was shortlisted for the Oxford Poetry Prize. She also dabbles in songwriting and co-wrote a song on Remy Le Boeuf’s album, Architecture of Storms, which was nominated for a 2023 GRAMMY in the Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album category. Pirkle's poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times, the Best of the Net Anthology twice, and the Independent Best American Poetry Award. She earned a PhD in English from Georgia State University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Georgia College & State University. She is an Associate Director of Creative Writing at The University of Alabama.
Anya Krugovoy Silver was born in Media, Pennsylvania in December of 1968, and she grew up in Swarthmore. The child of immigrants, her first two languages were German and Russian. She graduated from Haverford College, and she earned a PhD in literature from Emory University in Atlanta. In 1998, Silver and her husband began teaching at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. While pregnant with their son in 2004, she was diagnosed with and treated for inflammatory breast cancer. After five years of remission, her cancer returned as bone metastasis in 2010. She published four books of poetry and one book of criticism in her lifetime. She won the Georgia Author of the Year Award in 2015, and she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellow for Poetry in 2018, the same year in which she died. At the time of her death, she was in the process of editing her fifth book, Saint Agnostica, which was published in 2021 by Louisiana State University Press.
The following poems were recorded with permission from Louisiana State University Press:
Silver, Anya Krugovoy. “Blush” and “The Poem in My Childhood.” The Ninety-Third Name of God: Poems, Louisiana State University Press, 2010
Silver, Anya Krugovoy. “There’s a River.” I Watched You Disappear: Poems, Louisiana State University Press, 2014
Silver, Anya Krugovoy. “From Nothing.” From Nothing: Poems, Louisiana State University Press, 2016
Silver, Anya Krugovoy. “Being Ill.” Saint Agnostica: Poems, Louisiana State University Press, 2021
Links:
Sara Pirkle
Sara Pirkle's website
"Weighing the Options" in Delta Poetry Review
"Not Prometheus" in Eclectica
"Pretend You Don’t Owe Me a Thing" in Rattle
"Evolution of the Writing Process: A Conversation with Dr. Sara Pirkle Hughes"--University of Alabama
Anya Krugovoy Silver
Bio and poems at The Poetry Foundation
"Anya Krugovoy Silver, 1968-1018" in New Georgia Encyclopedia
"Reading Poetry in Illness," podcast episode at The SlowDown
"Anya Silver’s Heart-Wrenchingly Beautiful Last Poems," a review in The Christian Century
Anya Silver Archives in Image
