About
Karian Markos is a writer and nonprofit attorney based in Elmhurst, Illinois. Her debut poetry collection, Esemplastic: Many and One, (Highland Park Poetry Press, 2024) received the 2024 Prairie State Poetry Prize and earned the honorable mention for the 2025 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year. Karian’s award-winning poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including Carmina Magazine, Hemingway Shorts Literary Journal, Living Crue Magazine, and Bombfire. For more about Karian and her work, visit www.karianmarkos.com.
Featured Work
Esemplastic: Many and One
Esemplastic: Many and One by Karian Markos is the 2024 winner of Highland Park Poetry's Prairie State Poetry Prize for a 1st or 2nd Book selected by judge and poet Lennart Lundh. Mary Biddinger, author of Department of Elegy, describes Markos' poetry collection thus: "Esemplastic-Many and One is a sequence of illuminating meditations on everyday life and the significance of small moments. In crystalline, image-driven poems, Karian Markos examines themes such as mortality, the quest for completeness, and wisdom gained on the journey to adulthood. In the poem "Other," the book's speaker confides, "I am the bridge between lands and generations. / A recombinant being, unassimilated, / belonging to both and neither." In this captivating debut, Markos guides readers through complex emotional terrain with an eye for the extraordinary hidden within the ordinary."
