Alina Stefanescu

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. She is a poet, writer, translator, and essayist, and her published works include a poetry collection, DOR (2021), which won the 2020 Wandering Aengus Book Prize; the prose chapbook RIBALD (Bull City Press, 2020); a collection of short stories, Every Mask I Tried On (2018), which won the Brighthorse Prize; a hybrid collection, Stories to Read Aloud To Your Fetus (Finishing Line Press, 2018), which explores how we write, imagine, and inhabit wombed bodies; and a poetry chapbook, Objects in Vases (Anchor & Plume Press, 2016), which won the 2016 Award for Poetry Book of the Year from ASPS. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, BOMB, and Crab Creek Review, among other publications, and in various anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2022.

Stefanescu won the 2019 River Heron Poetry Prize, and her current poetry manuscript was selected as one of three finalists by Major Jackson for the 2021 Alice Day Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Stefanescu is Poetry Editor for Pidgeonholes, critic for various journals, President Emerita of Alabama State Poetry Society, Board Member for the Alabama Writer's Cooperative, Co-Director of PEN America’s Birmingham Chapter, Co-Founder of 100,000 Poets for Change Birmingham, Board member for Magic City Poetry Festival, and member of the National Association of Book Critics and American Literary Translator’s Association. She has served as a judge for literary prizes, including the River Heron Review Poetry Prize, FRiction Literary Prize for Flash Fiction, F. Scott Fitzgerald Museum & Foundation Writing Prize, The Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Literary Criticism, and others.

She’s been a finalist for many things, including the 2019 Kurt Brown AWP Prize, the 2019 Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, the 2019 Frank McCourt Prize, and the 2019 Streetlight Magazine Poetry Contest.