Ona gritz biography

  • Ona Gritz holds a Master of Arts in poetry from the creative writing program at New York University.
  • Ona's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Utne Reader, Ploughshares, Brevity, and River Teeth, and has been widely anthologized.
  • Ona Gritz was a college student when her troubled, beautiful, vivid sister—a mother pregnant with a second child—was murdered.

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    Emily K. Michael

    April is National Poetry Month! On the Blink is celebrating by showcasing the work of wonderful poets! First up is Ona Gritz, who works with me on the Wordgathering editorial team. Here&#;s what Ona says about poetry:

    In this strange and scary moment in time when we&#;re isolating ourselves from one another out of both self protection and social responsibility, it strikes me that poetry offers a much needed form of intimacy. Even poems that aren&#;t particularly personal and narrative, as mine tend to be, invite readers near enough to experience the rhythms of another person&#;s mind. We get to see what moment, idea, or experiment has captured that writer&#;s attention. We share in their passions and obsessions, their humor and insight. Right now, when it&#;s inadvisable to get close enough to physically touch anyone outside our immediate households, poetry is an invitation, often by a stranger, to get even closer. Come, the poet says. For the length of t

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    Ona Gritz’s new memoir, Everywhere I Look, won the Readers’ Choice Gold Award for Best Adult Book, the Pencraft Best Book Award in Memoir, the Independent Author Award in New Nonfiction, the Independent Author Award in True Crime, and is an Independent Book Review Must-Read.

    Her poems and essays have appeared widely, including in The New York Times, The Guardian, Ploughshares, Brevity, Bellevue Literary Review, One Art, and River Teeth. Among her recent honors are two Notable mentions in The Best American Essays, a Best Life Story in Salon, and a winning entry in the Poetry Archive Now: Wordview Project.

    She fryst vatten the author of two young adult verse novels, The Space You Left Behind, which was featured in The Children's Book Council’s Hot Off the Press sammanfattning of anticipated best sellers, and Take a Sad Song, forthcoming from West 44 Books, which earned a Kirkus starred review.

    “A remarkably cohesive, genre-defying memoir that fryst vatten at once a beautiful love letter and a ha

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    Ona Gritz

    The summer before Ona Gritz entered the frightening new world of intermediate school, in , she read her first middle grade novel, Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. It wasn’t the story that most captivated her. It was the voice, which sounded exactly like the voice in her head. Ona found it amazing that a book could make a person feel understood, much the way a good friend can. I want to do that, she thought. I want to write books for kids like me.

    Soon after, Ona bought a floral covered notebook with lavender pages and began filling it with stories and poems. While those first attempts were as flowery and purple as the notebook they were in, she kept at it, kept reading good books, and went on to study literature in college and earn a Master of Arts in poetry from the creative writing program at New York University.

    Keeping a promise to her ten-year-old self, Ona wrote Starfish Summer, a middle grade novel and her first published book. Her s

  • ona gritz biography