Arts & Sciences Magazine

By Heather Murray (CAS`26)

Each Monday morning, in the hallway of the BU Creative Writing Program office on Bay State Road, a new poem appears—neatly printed and quietly waiting on the bulletin board.

“It’s a small tradition with big intentions,” says Annaka Saari (GRS`21), the program administrator for the BU Arts & Sciences Creative Writing Program. “Even if someone doesn’t encounter a poem anywhere else during their day, they can at least be faced with one poem.”

Saari’s weekly poem is part of her mission to create a community around poetry and show that poetry can be accessible to everyone. She does that through her role as a program administrator, teacher, and unofficial advisor in the Creative Writing Program, as well as through her own poetry.

“Poetry is something that gets painted as an Ivory Tower,” Saari says. “As if there is a certain kind of poet or certain kind of person who loves poetry—like a professor with a long beard or a hippie in a field,” she says. “That is not the case—anyone can write poetry.”

Saari has loved and written poetry since childhood, but “had always been told that studying poetry wouldn’t be a route by which [she] could find a sustainable career.” So, she entered the University of Michigan as a chemistry major, planning to become a pediatric oncologist. Then, as an undergraduate, she took a poetry class called “The Cinematic Movement of Poetry” with poet A. Van Jordan, then a professor of English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan. Soon after, she switched her major to English, with a sub-concentration in creative writing.

“After taking that class, and future classes with Jordan and other poets like Khaled Mattawa at The University of Michigan, it became clear to me that I wouldn’t be able to move forward in my education in the sciences without regretting leaving the potential for an education in poetry behind,” she says.

With support from her faculty mentors, Saari applied to MFA programs. She chose BU, in part, to study with Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing and former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, who founded the “The Favorite Poem Project,” and to find ways to incorporate one of Pinsky’s core principles—that poetry is for everyone—into her daily life. The day after graduation, she was hired as the Creative Writing administrative coordinator.

“I recognize not everyone should make this choice, but I am so much happier here now than I would be entering medical school residency,” she says. “Now, working in the program and having the responsibility to plan poetry-centric events, teach the occasional undergraduate course, spend time with our incredible poetry faculty, and see a new group of talented writers move through the program every year, I’m glad that I made the decision to study what I love.”

As much as she “loves being a poet with health insurance,” Saari did not find her passion in the paperwork, but rather in creating a space where the incoming class is supported. BU’s 18 MFA students come from around the world and are all in different places in their careers, some with full and longstanding careers, and others are just starting their careers in writing. Saari finds her job most rewarding when she helps the students get to know each other and the faculty and helps to build community, she says.

In fact, despite all the mythical stories of the solitary writer, Saari says for her, “the most important thing about being a writer and a creator is having community.” Saari finds that in MFA programs, residencies, or just local workshops, there is a dual invitation saying “Here! Come into my work” and then feeling welcomed in others. And, she says, “Boston is one of the best poetry cities in the world.”

During her time at BU, Saari has taught several undergraduate-level creative writing classes, as well as high school students at the Boston Arts Academy through an annual partnership with the Creative Writing Program. She has also facilitated workshops with incarcerated individuals and individuals who identify as victims of sexual assault.

She started posting her weekly poems on August 30, 2021—soon after starting in the administrator role. Some of her poems are chosen because she loves them — like “Tin Bucket” by Jenny George and “There Are Birds Here” by Jamaal May. Others are selected because they’re about heritage months or holidays, like “Theme in Yellow”” by Carl Sandburg, posted just before Halloween in 2021. The July 21, 2025 poem, “The Hermits,” by Karen Solie, was chosen because one of Saari’s BU poetry classmates is teaching in a high school program on campus, “and he’s a big Solie fan,” she says. Saari “wanted to see him walk into the building and smile when he saw it.” 

“Sometimes, I’ll even pick a poem because it’s completely outside my own preferences/tastes and I want to mix things up,” she says. “I’m trying to keep things varied and interesting!” 

Saari’s own poetry explores what it would mean to break the social contracts of dating, intimacy, and attraction and refuse to meet expectations. She looks to more direct means of connection that avoids the performance where “we put on our little costumes, and we do our little dance, and we hope that the audience claps.”

Much of her recent work, including “A Curious Thing,” are poems situated in response to other writers’ investigations. She leans into the instinct in poetry to turn towards each other and to turn inwards while investigating these shared human experiences. Her own creative obsession is the “intersections between the possibilities of desire, the limits of etiquette, in the way in which we perform both of those things.”

She was recently awarded a 2025-2026 Poetry Fellowship from the Writers’ Room of Boston, a MacDowell Residency Fellowship, and a scholarship from the Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture and Boston Poet Laureate to attend a poetry workshop lead by poet and essayist Franny Choi. These fellowships and workshops will provide Saari with the space and camaraderie she is seeking as she finishes her first poetry book.

Through teaching, she has found that poetry—while it may “not make sense” or be “financially lucrative” with your life situation or degree path—can “sustain your soul and make the rest of your life at least a little more vibrant.” So she continues to encourage anyone who hasn’t taken a poetry class to consider the possibility, and posts her weekly poems to publicly showcase the power of poetry.

“There is so much stuff around you, if you open your mind to it,” she says. “That’s not to say you can’t still have passions and clock in at your finance job, but that’s also not to say that if you’re a freshman who is coming here to study business—that you can’t change your mind. So, if you are a senior and want to take one more fun class before you graduate or if you are a freshman in biology who’s like, you know what? I want to give this a try. Take a poetry class.”

Interested in taking a poetry course at CAS? Explore offerings from the Creative Writing Program. Portfolio Applications for EN 304 and 305 are accepted until August 10, 2025, via email (crwr@bu.edu).