Elena Karina Byrne will release her fourth book If This Makes You Nervous with Omnidawn in October 2021 and a separate chapbook entitled No, Don’t with What Books Press in 2020. She has also just completed a book of published, “interrupted” essays: Voyeur Hour: Meditations on Poetry, Art & Desire. As part of her interdisciplinary, collaboration-adventure, she is enrolled in Antioch University Santa Barbara's MFA program in Writing & Contemporary Media.

Former 12-year Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America, Elena is a freelance lecturer, editor, Poetry Consultant & Moderator for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and the Literary Programs Director for The Ruskin Art Club. In 2018 she completed her three years as one of the final judges for the Kate & Kingsley Tufts Awards in Poetry, and in 2019, her term for the Georgia Poetry Circuit.

A Pushcart Prize recipient, her publications, among others, include the Best American Poetry, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Verse Daily, BOMB, diode, The Kyoto Journal, Persea Books anthology The Eloquent Poem, Poetry International, and forthcoming issues of Blackbird, Narrative, Entropy, Adroit Journal, and New American Writing.