Joy Arbor-Karnes, Poetry Editor
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While very interested in women writers, Joy Arbor-Karnes is first and foremost a writer herself. Her poems have appeared (or will shortly appear) in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Many Mountains Moving, Crab Orchard Review, and Santa Barbara Review. She is also proud to have won the Phenomena of Place Poetry Prize and the Mary Merritt Henry Award.

She attended California State University, Northridge during the Northridge earthquake, graduating with her BA in English and Writing in 1995, when the classrooms were still portable trailers. Days after graduating, she moved to Sacramento with her husband, Jeremiah, where she drove a 90 mile-commute to Oakland in pursuit of her MFA in Creative Writing at Mills College. While at Mills, she developed an interest in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature such that she decided to continue her studies, enrolling in the English doctoral program at University of California, Davis in fall of 1998. She taught communication and took classes for a year, but then events conspired against her; Jeremiah was offered a job he couldn’t refuse in Austin, Texas. She followed. Joy is currently on academic leave for a year and has no idea what she is going to do with her infatuation with food in long eighteenth-century British literature and culture, not to mention her interest in little-read eighteenth-century women writers. But she’s enjoying having time to read for pleasure, write, and relax, often unknown states to those in the graduate school grind.

In the spare time she now has, Joy cooks elaborate meals, pets her cats, and watches movies. At the rate at which she is unpacking boxes, she might be all moved in to her Austin apartment by the turn of the millenium.

Faves: Fiction - Colette, Margaret Atwood, Alice Hoffman. Jane Austen. Erica Jong. Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees, Rebecca Wells’s The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Some little-girl books that I still love - Anne of Green Gables, the Little House books, Anna to the Infinite Power, Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and Harriet the Spy. Favorite male novelists - E.M. Forster, Robert Heinlein. Poetry - Li-Young Lee (yes, a man, but a very sensitive loving man), Lucille Clifton, Denise Duhamel, Louise Gluck, Billy Collins (another amazing man), Keats (the most amazing man), more Atwood. Dorothy Barresi, Chana Bloch, and Khaled Mattawa (yet another amazing man) - Joy is thankful she had the privilege of studying with all three of these fine poets.

From Joy: “I’m not at all as mean as I look in this picture. But I stand by a firm conviction that writers should be read and not seen.”