Carpathia

About the Author

Cecilia Woloch was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up there and in rural Kentucky, one of seven children of a homemaker and an airplane mechanic. She attended Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, earning degrees in English and Theater Arts, before moving to Los Angeles in 1979. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University L.A. in 1999. A celebrated teacher, Ms. Woloch has conducted poetry workshops for thousands of children and young people throughout the United States and around the world, as well as workshops for professional writers, educators, participants in Elderhostel programs for senior citizens, inmates at a prison, and residents at a shelter for homeless women and their children. She is the founding director of Summer Poetry in Idyllwild and of The Paris Poetry Workshop, and is currently a lecturer in the creative writing program at the University of Southern California as well as a member of the core faculty of the low-residency MFA Program in Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State University. Her previous books of poems are Sacrifice, a BookSense 76 selection in 2001; Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem; Late, for which she was named Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry in 2004; and a chapbook, Narcissus, winner of the Tupelo Press Snowbound Competition in 2006. Her poems have been anthologized in When She Named Fire: Contemporary American Women Poets; Best American Erotic Poetry: 1800 to the Present; Billy Collins' 180 More (Extraordinary Poems for Every Day), Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times, among many others, and have been featured on Keillor's The Writers' Almanac as well as in Ted Kooser's nationally syndicated column American Life in Poetry. She spends a part of each year traveling, and in recent years has divided her time between Los Angeles and Idyllwild, California; Atlanta, Georgia; Shepherdsville, Kentucky; Paris, France; Warsaw, Krakow, and a small village in the Carpathian mountains of southeastern Poland.