Autumn Konopka

Autumn Konopka is a poet, mother, and teacher, who was selected by Carl Dennis as the 2016 Montgomery County Poet Laureate. Her poems have appeared in Literary Mama, Crab Orchard Review, Philadelphia Stories, Apiary, Mad Poets Review, and others. In 2014, her chapbook a chain of paper dolls was published by the Head & the Hand Press. She has an MFA from Antioch University in Los Angeles, where she focused on memoirs in verse as well as the intersection of socio-economics and poetry. Autumn currently curates the Arthur Krasnow Poets and Poetry Series in Elkins Park, Pa. Find her online: autumnkonopka.com.

 

Artistic statement:

I am intrigued by the physics of space and time, but also deeply committed to paying mindful attention to the current moment. As such, I am drawn to art and poetry that challenges linear boundaries and respects the natural leaps of the mind — without becoming intentionally obscure or inaccessible. I love when poems bang against the walls of “genre”: is that a poem or lyric essay? flash memoir or prose poem? or is that something entirely different? But regardless of style, theme, content or tradition, I find myself returning, again and again, to poems that are built on the resonance of particulars, on the poet’s willingness to commit to the specificity of her own experience.