Erin Wilcox’s poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have been featured or are forthcoming in numerous literary journals, including Cirque, Praxis: Gender and Cultural Critiques, Spiral Orb, Stoneboat, The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide (University of Arizona Press), Cold Flashes: Literary Snapshots of Alaska (University of Alaska Press), Short and Twisted (Celapene Press), Veil: Journal of Darker Musings (Subsynchronous Press), and in radio broadcasts including KXCI Tucson’s A Poet’s Moment, Broad Perspectives, and Alaska Public Radio’s AK Radio. Her story “Half a World Away,” published in Crack the Spine, was nominated for a 2014 Pushcart Prize.
An editor of seventeen years’ experience, Erin maintains a vigorous freelance editorial practice and writes for various magazines including Copyediting and The Rumpus. She served as nonfiction editor for Drunken Boat: An Online Journal of Art and Literature from 2011 to 2015 and as copyeditor for Alaska Quarterly Review from 2004 to 2007. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Alaska, Anchorage.
Erin’s work assumes that boundaries of genre and form are permeable. Whether she is writing free verse, prose poetry, flash fiction, literary fiction, speculative fiction, or memoir, her stylistic goal is to serve the needs of a given piece. With versatility as a core value, she is hard put to capture her aesthetic in a few words. She does, however, believe that all creative writing is equally escapist, whether the content be mythic or mundane; that language offers no escape from cultural influence, only the opportunity to engage with it; that a sociological poetics uses language in a way that consciously engages with culture; and that using language to elevate consciousness is a serious, if entertaining, enterprise.
