About
Carolyn Oliver is a poet, writer, editor, teacher, and reviewer. She is the author of Whale Garden (forthcoming from River River Books in 2027), The Alcestis Machine (Acre 2024) and Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022), selected by Matthew Olzmann for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry. Her chapbooks are Mirror Factory (Bone & Ink Press, 2022), Dearling (dancing girl press, 2022), and Night Ocean (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023).
Carolyn’s writing appears in Smartish Pace, Plume, The London Magazine, Cincinnati Review, The Common, On the Seawall, Ecotone, Indiana Review, The Massachusetts Review, Cherry Tree, The Fiddlehead, Copper Nickel, Michigan Quarterly Review, Booth, The South Carolina Review, Tin House Online, SmokeLong Quarterly, 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, America, Beloit Poetry Journal, Tahoma Literary Review, and Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight (University of Arizona Press, 2020), among other journals and anthologies.
Carolyn was a 2023-24 Artist in Residence at Mount Auburn Cemetery. She is the winner of the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, selected by Linda Gregerson; the Louisville Literary Arts/The Louisville Review Writer’s Block Prize in Poetry, selected by Maggie Smith; New England Poetry Club’s E.E. Cummings Award, selected by C. Prudence Arceneaux; and The Worcester Review‘s Frank O’Hara Prize, selected by Rachel McKibbens. Carolyn’s writing has been nominated for Best New Poets, Best MicroFiction, and for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net in both fiction and poetry.
She served as the editor-in-chief of The Worcester Review from 2021 until 2024. She has also served on the board of the Worcester County Poetry Association, on the advisory board of the Mapping Worcester in Poetry Project, and as a mentor for poets in Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic Workshops.
A graduate of The Ohio State University (BA) and Boston University (MA), Carolyn works with a wide range of clients on writing and editing projects. She enjoys leading workshops and teaching.
Born in Buffalo and raised in Ohio, Carolyn now lives in Massachusetts with her family.
Find her on BlueSky and Instagram: @CarolynROliver
Interviews, Conversations, Recommendations
Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: On The Alcestis Machine
Mount Auburn Cemetery: With Julie-Anne Whitney on Mount Auburn’s Artist-in-Residence Program
The Talking Poem Podcast: With Charlie Green on Milton
Shenandoah‘s The Peak: In conversation with Donna Hemans
The Common: Recommending Karen Solie’s Pigeon
SmokeLong Quarterly: With Brenna Womer on “Nail Polish”
Milk Candy Review: With Cathy Ulrich on “The Patron Saint of Fury”
Carolyn Oliver 