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Rose Zinnia is a writer, editor, teaching artist, and designer. Born in Akron, Ohio, she is the author of Togethering (Ledge Mule Press, 2024), a hybrid chapbook of poetry & lyric essay. Her essays and poetry 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 the LGBTQ+ journal and press 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. She is currently at work on her debut novel and debut book-length essay.
Her debut book of poetry, Anarchic Womb, is forthcoming from Haymarket Books in Fall 2027.
“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 and gleaming field to join it.”
— ROSS GAY
“Rose Zinnia’s hybrid essay ‘Tranny Death Cult’ arrested me from its title and never once let me go. Its use of transformed personal photographs, social media screen grabs, and searing prose combine to build a concise, acute snapshot of the vile rhetoric, attitudes, and actions taken in the United States against transgender people—from Adrienne Rich in 1979 to a family Facebook post thread on attending Charlie Kirk’s memorial in 2025. The prose is heartbreaking, vulnerable in documenting messages with a doctor, sweet moments with an extended family member turned sour. They are lyrical in their associative, elliptical leaping, grounded in their citations. This is a sorrowful and enraged critique of the personal and the national—I mourning and thrashed alongside it.”
— DIANA KHOI NGUYEN
“Zinnia crosses and blurs and trans*s syntax and semantics into an ecstasy made of earth. Her work teaches me something about how the body is a transmitter and receiver of signals. How the body becomes more and less than itself.”
— MICHAEL MLEKODAY
“Zinnia’s poetry is stunning, featuring associative leaps alongside singular images, shifts in time, narrative, identities, and 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. It astonishes me. It tickles me. It inspires me.”
— ROSS GAY
“Unpinnable. Art for the futurity of possibility.”
— MATT HART
“A boundaryless, intuitive, exacting acrobatics of language.”
— MOLLY CROSS-BLANCHARD
Togethering
$16.00 ꔛ 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
SELECTED ONLINE PUBLICATIONS
⟡ BRINK ꔛ “Tranny Death Cult” (forthcoming)
⟡ 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 Prize Winner
⟡ WEST BRANCH ꔛ “We Tree Singers Free” (co-written w/ Ross Gay)
⟡ POEM-A-DAY ꔛ “Epistemological”
SELECTED PRINT PUBLICATIONS
⟡ 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 for Myour Pastfuture Transcestors (A Trans(re)lation)”
⟡ NINTH LETTER ꔛ Four Poems ➤ 2022 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 (ed. Diane Kendig)
⟡ BODY: MY ENEMY, MY FRIEND ꔛ Poetry In Voice/Les voix de la poésie (ed. Molly Cross-Blanchard)
⟡ THAT’S SO ME: SELF-ISH MIX ꔛ Peach Mag (ed. Sasha Debevec-McKenney)
⟡ PEACH MAG SEASON 1 YEARBOOK ꔛ Peach Mag
“Zinnia writes with disarming rawness and vulnerability.”— MATTER NEWS
Rose Zinnia’s writing shapeshifts, queers, and portals into open-hearted, multiplicitous worlds … [it] not only maintains the river of communication with readers, but pulls them closer—a boundaryless, intuitive, exacting acrobatics of language that lifts the fog from around her life-breathing philosophies … 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 ꔛ AWARDS ꔛ FELLOWSHIPS
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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PANELS ꔛ TALKS ꔛ WORKSHOPS
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