Writer Anna Journey was recently interviewed for VCU News. A VCU creative writing alumna who now teaches at University of Southern California, she is becoming well now for her poetry and essays. Her latest work, “An Arrangement of Skin”, is receiving a lot of praise.

In the interview, she is asked about her time at VCU-

Living in Richmond, too, profoundly influenced my development as a writer. I moved from Northern Virginia to Richmond when I was 18 and left for my doctoral studies in Texas just before I turned 27. So I came of age in Richmond, became more of my adult self there. I don’t think I recognized how thoroughly the character of the city shaped my sensibility until I’d moved away. I lived for a number of years in Oregon Hill, just three blocks down from the Sothern Gothic sprawl of Hollywood Cemetery, so that landscape — of mortality, of lavish visual and historical density — lodged itself in my consciousness.