A poet, editor, teacher, and fiction writer, Arah Ko is the author of BRINE ORCHID (YesYes Books 2025) and ANIMAL LOGIC (Bull City Press 2025) and has work published or forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, RHINO, Colorado Review, The Threepenny Review, Quarterly West, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She was nominated for Best New Poets 2023 by both Salt Hill Journal and Sugar House Review and Best of Net 2023 by New Ohio Review. She was awarded an Academy of American Poets Arthur Rense Prize, a Helen Earnhart Harley Creative Writing Fellowship Award in Poetry, and the 2021 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize.
Arah hails from Hawai'i. She received her MFA in creative writing from the Ohio State University in Columbus where she served on the staff of The Journal. A graduate of the Wheaton College English Honors program, Arah served as Editor-in-Chief for KODON, the college's septuagenarian literary magazine and winner of the 2017 AWP National Director's Prize for Design. She was the 2018 Luci Shaw Fellow for Image in Seattle, WA. She is a current Lilly Graduate Fellow. Arah currently serves as a Managing Editor for Surging Tide Magazine.
“The poems in this manuscript grapple with the alarming indifference the natural world has toward matters of mortality while at the same time grappling with the subtle traumas and bittersweet truths inherent in family and memory. Loss of various kinds finds a lyrical voice in these poems, as "Around us is a constant / cadence, an ancient clinging, / almost a song," one that rings unmistakably doleful and meditatively in these works.”
― Tory Adkisson, author of The Flesh Between Us
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
"Out of the Eater" & "Pullet" & "Glister" Waxwing, March 2024
"Fiddleback" & "Magpie" Shō Poetry Journal, January 2024
"Light a Candle" The Threepenny Review, November 2023
"Astraphobia" & "Omphalophobia" The American Poetry Review, November 2023
"Prodding for Wings to Come" Beaver Magazine, October 2023
"Cruel Merciful Instincts" Colorado Review, October 2023
Four Poems & an Interview Only Poems, October 2023
"Camaro" swamp pink (formerly Crazyhorse), October 2023
"This collection of lush poems swirls with coming-of-age
forces—along with religion, patriarchy, colonialism,
and climate change—toward breaking free in a new imagining."
―Shelley Wong
Feel free to contact me with any inquiries. I'd love to share my experience with you and I'm always open to new opportunities.