About Anya

Anya Achtenberg is an award-winning fiction writer and poet. Her novel Blue Earth, excerpted in Harvard Review under the title More Than The Wind, will be published in August by Modern History Press, which published her novella The Stories of Devil-Girl in 2008. Her second book of poetry,The Stone of Language, was published in 2004 by West End Press (Albuquerque) after being finalist in 5 poetry competitions. Her stories have received awards from Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story, New Letters, the Asheville Fiction Writers Workshop, the Raymond Carver Story Contest, and others. Her first book of poetry, I Know What the Small Girl Knew, was published by Holy Cow! Press (MN). She is at work on History Artist, a novel centering in the experience of a Cambodian woman born of an African American father at the moment the bombing of Cambodia by U.S. forces began. She received a Minnesota State Arts Board Individual Artist’s Initiative Grant to work on it in 2008.

She has taught creative writing widely, including at Intermedia Arts and The Loft in Minneapolis, New York University, School of Visual Arts in NY, Springfield College Boston, Hamline University, the University of Minnesota’s Split Rock Arts Program, the University of New Mexico’s Honors Program, and their summer conference in Taos; for organizations such as The International Women’s Writing Guild—at their yearly conference at Skidmore, at Scandinavia House in Manhattan, at Eleanor Roosevelt’s Cottage in Hyde Park, NY, and at the Santa Fe Women’s Club; at the Center for Contemporary Arts and for Word Harvest in Santa Fe; The Leaven Center—for the bringing together of the political and the spiritual, in Michigan; and with drop-out youth, working adults, and through residencies in Minnesota and New York City public schools. She spent years writing curriculum for young people in and out of the public schools.

She currently teaches writer’s workshops and classes throughout the country on deepening characterization, the essential elements of story, autobiography and autobiographical fiction, and is the founder and author of Writing for Social Change:Re-Dream a Just World, a series of multi-genre workshops on writing for social change.

She also offers manuscript consultations for fiction writers, poets, essayists and memoirists. Her private clients include a wide range of people geographically, professionally, and in terms of content, genre, and style; clients and former clients are publishing books, stories, essays and poems; winning prizes; completing novels and memoirs; studying in and graduating from MFA programs; and banishing writer’s block.