Anya Achtenberg Sefara-Rabi is a fiction writer and poet whose publications include the novel “Blue Earth,” the novella “The Stories of Devil-Girl,” poetry collections “The Stone of Language” and “I Know What the Small Girl Knew,” and individual works in many literary magazines, including Harvard Review, Gargoyle Magazine, Mizna, Tupelo Quarterly, Poet Lore, New Letters, and Another Chicago Magazine. She has recently completed another poetry collection, “Watch the Rising.” As of the beginning of 2025, she is close to completing “History Artist,” a novel long-in-progress, with an ensemble of characters connected to three genocides and their aftermaths and centered around a young Cambodian woman born with the U.S. bombing of Cambodia.
Anya consults with writers individually and teaches three series of fiction/creative nonfiction/multi-genre creative writing courses: 1) Writing for Social Change: Re-Dream a Just World; 2) The Disobedient Writer Workshops; and, 3) Say it! Digalo! A series of standalone multi-genre workshops (both craft-expanding and generative of new work). Learn more at Anya’s website.
Though she has long stood up for justice in many ways, she’s found that some of her most powerful activism has been to use her radical approaches to writing to help open the vast terrain of language and its associative power, in poetry and in narrative, for others; to help make room for their voices to be heard. Her own battle to be heard has never been separate from wanting to hear the full chorus of the world. She works through an organic approach to writing craft that expands creativity and context; interrogates conventional forms; counters historical amnesia; examines how history sits in us; and deeply considers the relationship of language and narrative structures to trauma, diaspora, lost languages, and lost places. She has been privileged to do this work with people from many different communities and experiences.
Current as of January 2025