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Rose Zinnia (b. Ohio, USA) is a writer, editor, teaching artist, and designer. She is the author of Togethering (Ledge Mule Press, 2024), a hybrid chapbook of poetry & lyric essay. Her essays and poems appear or are forthcoming in BRINK, Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape, POETRY, The Offing, CV2, Black Warrior Review, Poem-A-Day, The Journal, New Ohio Review, Gulf Coast, Split This Rock, and West Branch, among others.
Zinnia’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and the Kinsey Institute. Her essays and poems have won awards from BRINK, Ninth Letter, and the Academy of American Poets. An alumna of Kenyon Review & Tin House workshops, she holds an MFA from Indiana University, where she taught creative writing & literary editing/publishing.
She has served in editorial and jural roles for Vermont Studio Center, The Cincinnati Review, Indiana Review, and AWP. Currently, she works in production at Foglifter and as an editorial assistant for The Cincinnati Review. Zinnia lives in Cincinnati, Ohio where she is a doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati at work on her debut novel and debut book-length essay.
Her debut book of poetry is forthcoming from Haymarket Books in Spring 2028.
“Rose Zinnia’s work feels like the transubstantiation of love into language. It astonishes me. It tickles me. It inspires me. It plants a field of sunflowers in my heart then gently beckons that whole glad & gleaming field to join it.”
— ROSS GAY
“Rose Zinnia’s work arrested me & never once let me go. The prose is heartbreaking, vulnerable, lyrical in its associative, elliptical leaping, grounded in its citations. This is a sorrowful & enraged critique of the personal and the national—I mourned & thrashed alongside it.”
— DIANA KHOI NGUYEN
“Zinnia crosses & blurs and trans*s syntax & semantics into an ecstasy made of earth. Her work teaches me something about how the body is a transmitter & receiver of signals. How the body becomes more & less than itself.”
— MICHAEL MLEKODAY
“Zinnia’s poetry is stunning, featuring associative leaps alongside singular images, shifts in time, narrative, identities, & an overall focus on describing the contradictory feelings and thoughts of any given moment.”
— THE OCEAN STATE REVIEW
POETRY / LYRIC ESSAY
To order a copy of Togethering that is signed by Rose, buy below.
To order a non-signed copy, head here.
Veering consciously toward a greater collectivity, Togethering is a declaration to reach for each other and to let that sacred witnessing become the liferaft that carries us through the maelstrom of ongoing apocalypses. In a lyric essay embraced between poems, Rose Zinnia divinizes the coalition between loss and joy, queerness and the earth—the I, the we, and the us. Through encounters with strangers, herons, lovers, rivers, co-workers, family, the Internet, gingkos, Spirit, and a dental hygienist, she turns tenderly inward in order to expand more capaciously and lovingly outward, and in the process unwounds our living, lilts grief into grace. Togethering is the guide to noticing and then blossoming “the nests in which we are transformed to kin.”
Published by Ledge Mule Press, October 1st, 2024
6.5x7.5, 44 pages, Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-9993985-7-9
Veering consciously toward a greater collectivity, Togethering is a declaration to reach for each other and to let that sacred witnessing become the liferaft that carries us through the maelstrom of ongoing apocalypses. In a lyric essay embraced between poems, Rose Zinnia divinizes the coalition between loss and joy, queerness and the earth—the I, the we, and the us. Through encounters with strangers, herons, lovers, rivers, co-workers, family, the Internet, gingkos, Spirit, and a dental hygienist, she turns tenderly inward in order to expand more capaciously and lovingly outward, and in the process unwounds our living, lilts grief into grace. Togethering is the guide to noticing and then blossoming “the nests in which we are transformed to kin.”
“Togethering feels like the transubstantiation of love into language.”
ROSS GAY
“Unpinnable. Art for the futurity of possibility.”
MATT HART
“A boundaryless, intuitive, exacting acrobatics of language.”
MOLLY CROSS-BLANCHARD
Togethering
POETRY / LYRIC ESSAY ꔛ CHAPBOOK
To order a signed copy, buy below.
To order a unsigned copy, buy here.
Published by Ledge Mule Press
1 October 2024, Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-9993985-7-9
6.5 x 7.5, 44 pages
$16.00
SELECTED ONLINE PUBLICATIONS
NONFICTION
⟡ BRINK ꔛ “Tranny Death Cult” (forthcoming)
➤ The Brink Literary Journal Award for Hybrid Writing Winner
POEMS
⟡ QUEER POEM-A-DAY ꔛ “(I Wanted To Die) I Wanted To Stay Alive”
⟡ MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW: MIXTAPE ꔛ “Gender Ideology” & “Look [Redux]”
⟡ THE OFFING ꔛ “(Reassignment)”
➤ Pushcart Prize Nominee
⟡ POETRY ꔛ “I’m Like if Mary Oliver Had Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder”
⟡ LIKE A FIELD ꔛ “Tit Vein” and “Tendernest”
⟡ NEW OHIO REVIEW ꔛ “My Dental Hygienist Confides in Me”
➤ NORward Poetry Prize Finalist
⟡ PIGEON PAGES ꔛ “Iwe Don’t Want / to Speak Human…”
➤ Poetry Contest Honorable Mention
⟡ SPLIT THIS ROCK ꔛ “(Reassignment)”
⟡ THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS ꔛ “Skeleton Gender Reveal Party”
➤ Vera Meyer Strube Poetry Prize Winner
⟡ WEST BRANCH ꔛ “We Tree Singers Free” (co-written w/ Ross Gay)
⟡ POEM-A-DAY ꔛ “Epistemological”
SELECTED PRINT PUBLICATIONS
POEMS
⟡ BLACK WARRIOR REVIEW ꔛ “(Reassignment)”
⟡ CONTEMPORARY VERSE 2 ꔛ “Earthhurt” & “Be/coming Ill/egible”
⟡ FOGLIFTER ꔛ “The World is Always Ending / We Stay in Love”
⟡ THE JOURNAL ꔛ “(Reassignment)”
➤ Best New Poets Nominee
⟡ SYCAMORE REVIEW ꔛ “enfleshed / in the human / iwe flummox / & skyscrape”
➤ Puschcart Prize Nominee
⟡ GULF COAST ꔛ “Prayer / Teleportational Communiquè […]”
⟡ NINTH LETTER ꔛ Four Poems
➤ Ninth Letter Literary Award in Poetry
⟡ THE OCEAN STATE REVIEW ꔛ “Laster (Nonbinary)” & “Qatar Poem II”
PRESS
⟡ MATTER NEWS ꔛ Interview & Profile
⟡ THE OCEAN STATE REVIEW ꔛ Interview
ANTHOLOGIES
⟡ READ + WRITE: 30 DAYS OF POETRY ꔛ Cuyahoga County Public Library
⟡ BODY: MY ENEMY, MY FRIEND ꔛ Poetry In Voice/Les voix de la poésie
⟡ THAT’S SO ME: SELF-ISH MIX ꔛ Peach Mag
⟡ PEACH MAG SEASON 1 YEARBOOK ꔛ Peach Mag
“Zinnia writes with disarming rawness & vulnerability.”— MATTER NEWS
Rose Zinnia’s writing shapeshifts, queers, & portals into open-hearted, multiplicitous worlds. A boundaryless, intuitive, exacting acrobatics of language. I would like to follow this poet to her kinder futurepresent.
— MOLLY CROSS-BLANCHARD
Rose Zinnia’s work is full of tender language, quirky phrasings, and imagery that wound up me like a vine.
— EMILY GLOWE
Rose Zinnia’s unpinnable work—does not give up—urgently does not give up—on the idea that being together and holding together in revolutionary conflagration (the self, the collective, the choir that sings)—is in fact an activity alive, one that requires generosity, collaboration, vigilance, and grace … Art for the futurity of possibility and being in the flash and whirr without shame, “held together by fragments of delight.” Anarchic belonging! Rapturous flight! The invitation is a call to assemble in love!
— MATT HART
HONORS & AWARDS
2026 Peter Taylor Fellow, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop
2026 BRINK Literary Award for Hybrid Writing
2026 Hedgebrook Writer-in-Residence
2026 Academy of American Poets Prize, University of Cincinnati
2025 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship
2025 Vermont Studio Center Fellowship
2024 Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity Winter Writers Fellowship
2022 Ninth Letter Literary Award in Poetry
2022 Vera Meyer Strube Prize, The Academy of American Poets
2021 Kraft-Kinsey Award, Kinsey Institute
READINGS
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