Annaka Saari


Disciplines: Literature – poetry
Disciplines: Literature – poetry
Based in Boston, MA
Residencies: 2026
Portrait by: Oriana Camara

Annaka Saari is a writer from Michigan. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Pleiades, Image, Cleveland Review of Books, The Maine Review, Plume, and other publications. Saari has recently been awarded the Scotti Merrill Emerging Writer Award in Poetry by the Key West Literary Seminar (2025), a Fine Arts Work Center Poetry/Writing Scholarship by the Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture and the Boston Poet Laureate (2025), and a Writers' Room of Boston Poetry Fellowship (2025-2026).

While at MacDowell, she completed the first draft of her first full-length poetry collection. Poems from the manuscript have been published or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, 32 Poems, The Missouri Review, The Maine Review, and elsewhere.

Studios

Calderwood

Annaka Saari worked in the Calderwood studio.

In the winter of 1998, motivated by his passion for reading, Stanford Calderwood donated funds for a new writers’ studio. Stanford Calderwood, a newspaperman in his youth who later went on to establish an investment firm, was a lover of nonfiction and was a member of MacDowell’s board of directors…

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