Elena Karina Byrne is a teacher, fine artist and Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America. She currently runs the poetry reading series at the J. Paul Getty Center where she recently worked as a Poetry Consultant to the Getty Research Institute. Elena is also the Poetry Moderator and Consultant for the Los Angeles Times Book Festival. Nominated six times for a Pushcart Prize, Elena's poems are forthcoming in nine magazines including, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Colorado Review, Prairie Schooner, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Volt. Other recent publications include Poetry, Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Nimrod, Antioch Review, Mid-American Review, The Virginia Quarterly, and The Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry, among many others.

About The Flammable Bird:

"Like Hopkins's kingfisher, Elena Karina Byrne's flammable bird takes off from the branch of human passion, though the heaven she is drawn to is desire itself, "the sanctuary of hunger," the appetite that will not be fed. Enfleshed, inflamed, insatiable, these form her holy trinity, and the heady, headlong language of her poems has honored them with an artful liturgy of devotional wonders."
—Sherod Santos

"Elena Karina Byrne's The Flammable Bird is a powerful and exquisite collection of poems. Graceful and lyrically complex, this work invites us into the layered realms of consciousness, into both the sublime pleasures and the raw psychological densities of contemporary experience. Like the phoenix, Elena Karina Byrne lifts herself—and us— high above the ash of our disappointments and regrets. A marvelous debut."
—David St. John

"Sometimes, when a gifted poet bides his or her time, their first book seems more like a fourth or fifth book. The Flammable Bird is like that: a book flung whole, utterly original, beautiful and seamless, upon the world."
—Tom Lux