Caroline Swanson

BA, Literature & Writing, University of Iowa; MFA, Creative Writing & Poetics, Naropa University

MFA in Creative Writing

Swanee Astrid is a poet-scribe from Sacramento, CA with degrees in Literature and Writing from the University of Iowa (BA) and Naropa University (MFA). She has been an editor for Earthwords, Vestal Review, and Bombay Gin Literary Journal. She is launching a new venture, VIBRISSAE Editions, a sensory ecology of publishing.

Swanee has served on the boards for the Sacramento Poetry Center and collective.aporia of which she is a founding member. Swanee has also been an executive assistant to the Jaipur Literary Festival at Boulder (2015-2018) and is the Summer Writing Program Managing Director and department Administrator for the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

Swanee is a performance collaborator who has written, performed, directed, produced for such productions as Praeludium Ex-Machina (Naropa MFA Festival, 2016), The Beat Drags On (Boulder Arts Week 2016 & 2017), and for such venues as Jose Montoya’s Poetry Unplugged, Avotcja’s Palabra, Mutiny Information Café, Fox Theatre, and the Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop.

Swanee’s areas of research include astro-anthropology, Nordic animism, language permutation, world building, eco-feminism, and contemporary mythopoetic narrative frameworks.

In July 2021, Swanee gave a talk on Valkyrie Poetics for the Heathen Women United Conference, as an artistic response to environmental leadership through the metaphor of the Valkyrie as embodiment of feminine warriorhood necessary for the battle against climate cataclysm This talk was revised and published by the Wisdom Body Collective in their Works In Progress series in 2021.