Emma Komlos-Hrobsky is a writer, illustrator, and editor who tells stories at the intersection of the human and the fantastic. Her writing appears in Tin House, Guernica, Hunger Mountain, Conjunctions, Book Forum, and The Story Collider. A creative polymath, Emma’s work often combines word and image to create narrative through maps, mail art, comics, and forms beyond category. She has a particular interest in the ways the ideas of science can provide new means of relating human experience. With the support of a fellowship from the Elizabeth George Foundation, she is at work on a novel about particle physics, family, and the Alps.
An alumni of Wesleyan, Emma earned her MFA in fiction at the New School. For nine years, she served as an editor at Tin House, most recently as a senior editor for its magazine and associate editor for its books division. She founded and directed the Tin House Craft Intensives, a pioneering new style of writing classes offered in the magazine’s offices. She currently serves as associate editor at Poets & Writers magazine.
Emma has over a decade of experience teaching at the graduate and undergraduate levels; she loved introducing art students to new synonyms for “blue” as an ESL instructor at The New School and serving as advisor to 12th Street, the award-winning undergraduate magazine of the Riggio Honors Program. She has also taught for Writers @ Work and the Masters Review.
Other undertakings include award-winning original scholarship on Plath’s conception of poetic making, religion, and subjectivity; oil painting; printmaking; and the writing, illustrating, and Activities Director-ing of the world’s greatest summer-camp-by-mail. With director Anna Lindemann, she is the co-writer of The Colony, a multimedia performance piece in which the eusocial behavior of a colony of army ants provides the language through which two estranged sisters reunite. She hails from Boulder, Colorado, and lives, alas, in New York City.