Ona gritz biography
- Ona Gritz holds a Master of Arts in poetry from the creative writing program at New York University.
- Ona's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Utne Reader, Ploughshares, Brevity, and River Teeth, and has been widely anthologized.
- Ona Gritz was a college student when her troubled, beautiful, vivid sister—a mother pregnant with a second child—was murdered.
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A remarkably cohesive, genre-defying memoir that is at once a beautiful love letter and a haunting true-crime investigation.
— Kirkus Reviews
Potent and meaningful, this is a mini-coming-of-age, written in verse, that draws you in until the last page.
— Bookworm for Kids
A thoughtful must-read that explores grueling attempts to destroy girls’ spirits.
— Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
PRAISE FOR EVERYWHERE I LOOK
Storytrade Nonfiction Book of the Year
Pencraft Best Book Award in Nonfiction - Memoir
Readers’ Choice Gold Award for Best Adult Book
Independent Author Award in New NonFiction
Independent Author Award in True Crime
An Independent Book Review 2024 Must-Read
... This is a remarkably cohesive, genre-defying memoir that is at once a beautiful love letter and a haunting true-crime investigation. A poignant, gripping story of love, memory, and physical and psychological brutality.
— Kirkus Reviews
A stunning and deeply moving exploration of grief and healing, beautifully told by Gritz with raw honesty and vu
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“I know why you write about me so much,” my son, Ethan, said to me once. “It’s because I’m so important to you.”
Writing has been a natural response to parenting for me; a kind of overflow. In poems, I’ve sought the perfect word to describe the particular blond of Ethan’s hair. Honey-colored, I wrote, because, as it changes with the seasons, his hair takes on the various hues of that thick, sweet stuff lined up in jars. I’ve attempted to describe the still, not-yet-animated face I glimpsed in the birthroom mirror seconds before he woke to the world. Calm as milk in its cup. I’ve written about the rifle he used at summer camp. How the hand that once lay splayed on my chest as he nursed has held an actual weapon. He’s a teenager now, but recently I drafted a poem in which I witnessed his tentative first steps, noting anew how they mirrored my own palsied walk.
My palsied walk. Disability is another subject that frequents my poems, but not because it compels me the way motherhood does. Writing about it has be
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Ona Gritz’s new memoir, Everywhere I Look, won the Readers’ Choice Gold Award for Best Adult Book, the Pencraft Best Book Award in Memoir, the Independent Author Award in New Nonfiction, the Independent Author Award in True Crime, and is an Independent Book Review 2024 Must-Read.
Her poems and essays have appeared widely, including in The New York Times, The Guardian, Ploughshares, Brevity, Bellevue Literary Review, One Art, and River Teeth. Among her recent honors are two Notable mentions in The Best American Essays, a Best Life Story in Salon, and a winning entry in the Poetry Archive Now: Wordview 2020 Project.
She is the author of two 2024 young adult verse novels, The Space You Left Behind, which was featured in The Children's Book Council’s Hot Off the Press roundup of anticipated best sellers, and Take a Sad Song, forthcoming from West 44 Books, which earned a Kirkus starred review.
“A remarkably cohesive, genre-defying memoir that is at once a beautiful love letter and a haunting true-crime investigation.”
– Kirkus Reviews
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