Elena Karina Byrne is a visual artist, teacher, editor, Poetry Consultant and Moderator for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and former 12 year Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America. She has organized readings for the University of Southern California's Doheny Memorial Library, the J. Paul Getty Center GRI, and the Chateau Marmont. Currently she is Literary Programs Director for The Ruskin Art Club and the Museum Of Contemporary Art's Night Vision poetry programs. She is also working with the West Hollywood Book Fair's Planning Committee and with Red Car studios on several short film projects including, Muse of Fire and Why Shakespeare?

All the poems by Elena Karina Byrne that have appeared on Verse Daily:
June 15, 2007:   "O Mouth Fable" " It darkens in the bride..."
December 21, 2002:  "The Proportion of Broken" "Relentless, I love relentless: relentless..."

Books by Elena Karina Byrne: Masque The Flammable Bird,

Other poems on the web by Elena Karina Byrne:
"Queequeg's Tattoos: A Headless Mask"
"The Collector Calls"
"The Sound of Sheep Before Shearing"
Two poems
"Ghost Mask"
"Without the Elation of Rage"
"Immaculate Measure"
"Disguise Mask"
"Mask of Marie Antoinette"
"Place Fable"

About Masque:

"The Greeks highest compliment to Odysseus was to call him ‘myriad-minded.’ Shall we say of Elena Karina Byrne's amazing sequence that it is ‘myriad-masked?’ By turns poignant, intricate, ingenious — Byrne’s poems explore and dramatize the theme of mask into a multiplicity of insights and imaginings almost as rich as consciousness itself."
—Gregory Orr

"Ancient, proliferative, profligate, and prophetic as language itself— ‘I am that greased machinery of heresy and hearsay’—these poems might have issued from the oracle at Delphi herself..."
—Angie Estes

"Instantly ticklish and slowly narcotic, the language of Elena Karina Byrne’s curious index of masks in her book nearly confounds the rigour of its ancient form, the poetic catalogue. Yet one cannot help but trail the voice threading through these veils made of words, as once Luciferian and terribly vulnerable to its own power, as it escorts the reader, and abandons her, into a dappled space reminiscent of one of Tolstoy's great Russian balls—a social and erotic prospect distilled to meteoric gestures. One can only yield to the naked hermeticism of this book"
—Daniel Tiffany