Biography
Anne M. Doe Overstreet is a poet, a creative writing mentor, and an editor whose work is to be attentive, to make art out of rabbit trails and curiosity.
Anne is the author of Delicate Machinery Suspended: Poems, of which Mary Van Denend from The Other Journal wrote
Here is a book saturated with reverence for the intricacies of living things, for the connection of bone and sinew, for the fox femur and the severed human limb, the part always suggesting the mystery of the whole. Here is a book where the half-light between waking and dreaming suspends the dreamers, calling us to that thin space between wave and shore. The shore might be a hospital waiting room; the waves could be the flailing heartbeats of one we love. The boundaries blur between interior and exterior space. But always, in the end, the poet quietly leads us to the place where wonder resides and where the Holy speaks.
An Oregon Soapstone Residency recipient and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Anne’s poems have appeared in journals such as Books & Culture, Nimrod International Journal of Poetry and Prose, The Other Journal, Asheville Poetry Review, DMQ Review, Relief, and Talking River Review; have been included in CIVA’s photography exhibit book Again + Again; and have appeared as part of the Cody Center Exhibition “Pairings” at Laity Lodge in Texas. Her work has also been included in multiple collections from the Tweetspeak Poetry group and has appeared in the books How to Read a Poem, by Tania Runyan, and So Fill Our Imaginations: The Work and Play of a Year of Preaching, by Mark Lloyd Taylor. She had the privilege of interviewing the writer Luci Shaw for Image and her creative nonfiction has appeared at Tweetspeak Poetry, in Kindred Magazine, and in Christianity Today’s “This is Our City” column.
She has served as a Writer-in-Residence and instructor of creative writing for the Nick Barker Writer in Residence Program at Covenant College, and mentored fiction writers and poets at Corban University’s Portals Writers Conference. She has taught workshops at numerous conferences and retreats, including a Master Poet’s course, “Mapping the Body,” through Tweetspeak; “Persevering in Poetry” at the Northwest Christian Writers Renewal Conference; and “Generative Journaling” at the Mercer Island’s Presbyterian Church’s women’s retreat. In the past, she has participated as an associate editor for the DMQ Review and an assistant editor for The Crossing, a journal of art and faith.
In her broader creative life, she served as Artist-in-Residence at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, was invited to be a reader in the Seattle City Council’s Word’s Worth Series participants, read for local venues such as the Soul Food Reading Series and the Victrola Reading Series, and was a guest speaker and volunteer for Einstein Middle School’s The Write Stuff afterschool club. She remains a member of the Chrysostom Society, a national writers’ guild started by Richard J. Foster, Karen Burton Mains, and Calvin Miller, for whom she co-edited (with Matthew Dickerson) Silent Passages: A Collection of Essays About the Writings of Walt Wangerin.
Anne is the primary editor and owner of Spine-Line Editing, whose projects run the gamut, from safety protocols for modern dentistry to dystopian fiction to murder mysteries and include Endurance 101: A Gentle Guide to the Sport of Long-Distance Riding, by Aarene Storms, and The Waterfront Mysteries series, by Jeffrey Briggs. She has been a consulting editor for Jeffrey Overstreet’s fantasy tetralogy The Auralia Thread and memoirs Through a Screen Darkly and Lost & Found in the Cathedral of Cinema. Her sweet spot is ordering and shaping poetry manuscripts. Between projects, she still works as a private gardener in Seattle. Previously, she has worked as a medical courier, a histotech, an administrative assistant for a research lab, a phlebotomist, and a paralegal, all of which have informed the curiosity that drives her writing.