Conversations with
​Carolyn Zaikowski

​12 or 20 series with Carolyn Zaikowski at Rob McLennan's blog

It's all Finger-Pointing at the Moon at with Meghan Lamb at the Rumpus

Paging All Punks at Razor Cake 
​
Meet the Writer at Grab the Lapels

Ghosts, trauma, animals, and writing with j/j hastain at Big Other

On Learning to Sit With Death

Carolyn Zaikowski

Carolyn Zaikowski is a fiction writer, poet, essayist, and death doula. She is the current Poet Laureate of Easthampton, Massachusetts.

Carolyn is the author of two prose poetry/experimental novels: A Child Is Being Killed (Aqueous Books, 2013), which poet Eileen Myles called a "saint of a little book", and In a Dream, I Dance by Myself, and I Collapse, which won the Mainline Contest at Civil Coping Mechanisms and was released in 2016.

Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been published widely, in such publications as Washington Post, Alaska Quarterly Review, West Branch, Denver Quarterly, The Rumpus, PANK, Sixth Finch, Heavy Feather Review, DIAGRAM, Dusie, Huffington Post, and Everyday Feminism.

​Carolyn holds a BA summa cum laude in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she researched trauma, the psychology of meat eating, and political protest movements. She then earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where she studied trauma and narrative, the subversion of Western literary genre constructs, and the roles that poetry and storytelling play in anti-fascist, anti-colonialist, and feminist resistance. She has taught English and gender studies in the USA and abroad, including in Kolkata, India's red light districts and to political exiles in safe houses at the Thai-Burma border.

Carolyn works as a creative writing teacher, manuscript consultant, and funeral celebrant/death doula. Sign up for her newsletter here for updates.

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Carolyn's 2010 MFA thesis, "Reading Traumatized Bodies of Text," was published at Nebula: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Scholarship and explains the mode of writing which informs much of her process and work. She writes:

"This is a chronically traumatized—and traumatizing—society, and the magnitude of its trauma is a relatively new development in history. We need narrative forms that can accommodate this reality. We need to represent the unrepresentable in a thorough and complicated manner that does as much justice to it as possible. Furthermore, we need styles of interpreting and reading that can accommodate this reality. Traumatic sites are not linear sites, are not simple sites, are perhaps not even comprehensible sites... Though more traditional literary forms serve a crucial purpose in the witnessing and integration of trauma, we also need language and syntax which take that first step of meeting traumatic shattering where it is at—and readers who can do the same. We need both the text and the reader-witness to attend to the traumatized space; to hold it with a tolerance for ambiguity and confusion; to maintain the heartbeat of patient, compassionate witnessing that will make real the possibility of healing, integration, and ultimately, a new world. This is a politically and culturally indispensable concern of literature."

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