Anna Journey (born November 1980 in Arlington, Virginia) is an American poet and essayist who was awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. She is the author of the essay collection, An Arrangement of Skin (Counterpoint Press, 2017) and three books of poems: The Atheist Wore Goat Silk (Louisiana State University Press, 2017), Vulgar Remedies (Louisiana State University Press, 2013), and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), the latter of which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California, where she is an assistant professor of English.
She graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University, with an MFA in creative writing. She taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, and served as an associate editor for Blackbird. She received her Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston, where she served as a poetry editor for Gulf Coast.
Journey is the author of the poetry collection, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (Georgia, 2009), selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. Film director David Lynch called her book, via Twitter, "magical." Her poetry appears in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, FIELD, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, 'Shenandoah, Gulf Coast,' and Blackbird. Her critical essay on Sylvia Plath ("'Dragon Goes to Bed With Princess': F. Scott Fitzgerald's Influence on Sylvia Plath") appears in Notes on Contemporary Literature. Her essay, "Lost Vocabularies: On Contemporary Elegy" appears in Parnassus: Poetry In Review." In 2006, Journey discovered the unpublished status of Plath's early sonnet "Ennui" that was published in Blackbird.