Karenmaria Subach’s background is in literature, languages, and history. She is a conscientious and dynamic teacher who grew up near Philadelphia among lively Lithuanian-Polish speaking storytellers hailing from the Pennsylvania Coal Region. She holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, Oxford University (where she was a Thouron Scholar) and the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow in Poetry. Her full-length collection of poems, Her Breath on the Window, placed in several national contests including the Yale, Walt Whitman, and WordWorks series and has just come out with Carnegie Mellon University Press. Mysteries, her chapbook, was a finalist in Finishing Line Press’s Open Competition in 2008. Subach's poems and stories have appeared  in The American Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, CutBank, Folio, Georgetown Review, Kalliope, New England Review, New Letters, Pudding, and Roanoke Review, among others. She has been a scholar for the NEH Poets in Person series, Visiting Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Washburn University of Topeka, a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a committed university lecturer within both English departments and institutions of English for Non-Native Speakers. Prior to the pandemic she taught annually for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival for twenty-nine years. Among her students have been veterans, refugees, gifted middle school learners, Elderhostel adventurers, before- and after-school program munchkins, AP British Lit seniors, and generations of undergraduates, both traditional and non-. She has captioned telephone calls for the hearing-challenged community, worked many retail jobs, the best of which was in an aromatherapy apothecary, and weathered with humor the adventures of both adjunct-academia and national testing companies. She works as an editor and lives along the Wasatch Range of the Rocky Mountains.