Lena Crown is a writer, editor, and educator from Northern California. Her essays are published or forthcoming in The Rumpus, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Narratively, North American Review, The Offing, and elsewhere, and her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Boiler, Poet Lore, No Contact, and Variant Lit. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from George Mason University, where she received the award for Outstanding Graduate Student.
Lena has received fellowships from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Peter Bullough Foundation. In 2022, she served as the PEN/Faulkner Writer in Residence in Washington, D.C. She also managed the Author’s Corner Program for The Inner Loop, a literary nonprofit and reading series that aims to celebrate the work of D.C. writers and forge connections between writers, readers, indie bookstores, and community members.
She currently serves as the 2023-24 Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in nonfiction at Colgate University, where she teaches creative writing while working on a memoir and an essay collection. She previously taught creative nonfiction, multi-genre creative writing, and literature at George Mason University.
As an editor at Autofocus, she has edited A Calendar Is a Snakeskin by Kristine Langley-Mahler and Organic Matter by E.N. Couturier.