Draft:Olivia Dresher

Olivia Whitaker Dresher (born May 13, 1945) is an American writer, anthologist, publisher, and editor. She is noted for championing fragmentary forms of literature, including the aphorism, journal/notebook entry, and the poetic post on Twitter/X. She has been at the forefront of bringing attention to these short forms as a distinct literary genre through her publishing projects, anthologies, and original work.

Drawing inspiration from classical aphorists and diarists such as Anais Nin, as well as from short form writers such as Joseph Joubert, Fernando Pessoa, and Antonio Porchia, Dresher’s work also incorporates an appreciation of contemporary digital platforms which lend themselves to fragmentary literature, including Twitter/X (where she has written thousands of posts since 2009). Her anthologies have provided materials for scholars seeking to address these short forms in college literature courses, and her contribution to promoting and reviving the form has been recognized internationally.

Works
Darkness and Light: Private Writing as Art (an anthology of contemporary journals, diaries, and notebooks co-edited with Victor Munoz), 2000. ISBN 978-1583485606

In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing, Impassio Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0971158351

A Silence of Words, Impassio Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1098940393

Fragments of a Failed Mystic, Impassio Press, 2023. ISBN 979-8850777159

Her writing has also appeared in various literary journals and collections, including Short Flights (2015) and Short Circuits (2018), both anthologies edited by James Lough and Alex Stein.

Publisher and editor
Dresher is the founder, publisher, and editor of Impassio Press, an independent literary press which has published fragmentary writings and other short forms since 2002. She has also edited and published FragLit: an online magazine of fragmentary writing between 2007 and 2010, and in 2012 worked with writer Catherine Ednie as editor of the Fragments issue of qarrtsiluni. Among the authors Dresher has published in her anthologies and online magazine are: Kate Gale, Ellis Avery, James Geary, William Stafford, Kim Stafford, Alexis Rotella, Yannos Ritsos, Karen An-hwei Lee, William Pitt Root, Christopher Cokinos, Rane Arroyo, Simon May, Lars Iyer (Spurious), and Yahia Lababidi.

Life
Dresher was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Southern California. In 1981, she moved to Seattle (where she currently still lives) and studied with Sheila Bender. Her father, Melvin Dresher, was a Polish-born mathematician and one of the pioneers of Game Theory. Her brother is the composer and performer Paul Dresher.