Crystal Oliver
Crystal Oliver is the Editor-in-Chief of the EcoTheo Review and served as Poetry Editor at EcoTheo since 2018. She also serves as the Director of the annual Chesapeake Writers' Conference. A poet and songwriter, she is also a senior lecturer of English and adjunct professor of Music at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She has particular interests in poetry, literary citizenship as community service, studies in songwriters, and professional literacy. Her areas of teaching specialization include creative writing, the poetics of song, and feminist and multicultural critical approaches to the literature of music, magic, and addiction.
She has also taught at Pratt Institute, The City University of New York, and Brooklyn College, among other places. She has released four albums: Fixing to Break (MW Records, 2002), Bessie's Last Stand (2003), Voter (2007), and Light it Up (2012). Her writing has appeared in Bluestem, The Brooklyn Review, The Delmarva Review, Woman, and Southern Maryland: This Is Living.
Crystal received the 2022 Jordan Teaching Exemplar Award and the 2022 Andy Kozak Faculty Contribution to Student Life Award. She received the Henrietta Spiegel Creative Writing Award from the University of Maryland, College Park, and earned her M.F.A. in Poetry from Brooklyn College.