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. Webpage:carolynzaikowski.com