A poet, editor, teacher, and fiction writer, Arah Ko is the author of BRINE ORCHID (YesYes Books 2025) and ANIMAL LOGIC (Bull City Press 2026) and has work appears in The American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, RHINO, Colorado Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She is a multi-time nominee for Best of Net, Best New Poets, and the Pushcart Prize. Her fiction is in the Eastover Anthology of Rural Writers of Color 2024. 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 grew up in rural Hawai'i. She is a Ph.D. student at The University of Cincinnati and received her M.F.A. 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 member of Cohort 12 of the Lilly Graduate Fellows. Arah currently serves on the staff of The Cincinnati Review.
“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
"Turtle Ship" & "Cult Of" diode, October 2025
"Whale Fall" 32 Poems, September 2025 (Print)
"Violence or Voice? Why Erasure Poetry" The Cincinnati Review, January 2025
"In the Year of Peace" & "Whatever We Began As We Became Something Else" Poetry Northwest, Winter 2024 (Print)
"I've Seen Many Kinds of Roadkill" Honey Literary Inc., August 2024
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.