Kianna Greene is a poet, writer, and educator.
Kianna Greene is a poet and writer living in Orlando, Florida, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida.
Kianna currently serves as an Associate Poetry Editor for The Florida Review and Director of The Cypress Dome, the University of Central Florida’s undergraduate literary journal.
Her work has won Ashland Poetry Press’s 2026 Poetry Broadside Contest, Ruminate’s 2021 Flash Prose Prize in Nonfiction, and has been named a finalist for Frontier Poetry’s 2025 Misfit Poem Prize, and nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. Kianna is an alumna of The Kenyon Review’s Writers Workshop and The Key West Writers’ Workshop.
In her work, Kianna is specifically interested in combining elements of poetry and creative nonfiction to explore narration through a vulnerable speaker. Inspired by the redemptive nature of Christianity, Kianna uses writing as a means of reconciliation, allowing her to rebirth experiences, rewrite personal and familial history, and forgive things she can now only change with words. Currently, she is working on her second collection of poems inspired by the notion of stillness.
Recent Awards and Publications
Winner of Ashland Poetry Press’s 2026 Poetry Broadside Contest, Publication Forthcoming
Poetry
“clotted berries on buttered croissants. sucked peach pits.
peeled dandelion stems. the twist and twitch of a morning
stretch. the second-to-last chip in the bag. the shape of the word mercy.
garage doors and their gurgling sounds. E’s laugh when the stubborn
wreck of our coughs crunch. forgotten food in the fridge.
wondering, as a child, if food had feelings. if it cared to be left
over. being asked how I could still kiss my mother gently, say
mama with meaning, after all, after all of that. sitting in a living room
scented with fresh loss and old prayers and still thinking, I love it here.
when the sun pretends it can’t see me. when I pour vinegar to keep the house
cool. when the afternoon is free of birds or anything large enough
to bristle. when I am still surprised when people I know die.
the slick of seaweed at cocoa beach, and its real name — sargassum.
how much it sounds like sarcasm. how words remind us
of other words. how spitting reminds me of my brother’s mind,
of the summer it lost him, of the hard rain that spring afternoon
it returned. how I laugh after calling something by the wrong name.
like saying a spart a may when I meant aspartame. like my mother
calling out the dog’s name when she meant to call for mine.
the ending of angry and hungry. how I can almost say last night,
I gried and gried and gried. how english has no verb to describe
a temporary state of being. how we need adjectives. how I need
other languages. how in spanish I can say, I have hunger
as if I could give it back. ”