Carolyn Oliver is a writer, poet, editor, and reviewer. She is the author of The Alcestis Machine (Acre Books, forthcoming 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, forthcoming 2023).
Carolyn’s writing appears in Smartish Pace, Plume, Cincinnati Review, The Common, On the Seawall, FIELD, 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 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 is the editor-in-chief of The Worcester Review, and serves on the board of the Worcester County Poetry Association and on the advisory board of the Mapping Worcester in Poetry Project.
A graduate of The Ohio State University (BA) and Boston University (MA), she also works with a wide range of clients on writing and editing projects.
Carolyn lives in Massachusetts with her family.
Find her on Twitter and Instagram: @CarolynROliver
Interviews, Conversations, Recommendations
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 