I'm Anna Osinski — writer, author, and someone who spent about 25 years being too scared to publish anything.

That changed in December 2024, when I released Swimming Toward the Riptide, a collection of poems I'd been writing (and hoarding) since I was fifteen. It's available now in paperback and e-book. You should buy it. (I'm practicing saying that out loud.)

I've been writing since I was a kid — short stories, fiction, essays, poems — and for most of my life I kept it all to myself. I worried about what people would think. About being seen. Poetry in particular felt like handing someone a piece of evidence about who I really am.

What changed wasn't that I stopped being scared. It's that I decided the cost of staying quiet was higher than the cost of being seen.

Swimming Toward the Riptide takes its name from that idea — the counterintuitive survival rule that says the only way out of a riptide is to stop fighting it. Let it carry you. Wait. Then swim. Fighting it is how you drown. For me, it became a metaphor for everything I'd been white-knuckling for years: the dreams I'd deferred, the words I'd swallowed, the version of myself I kept locked in notebooks and my notes app.

I'm working on what comes next. In the meantime, I write regularly on my Substack, Haus of Lore — personal essays, pop culture, and whatever I can't stop thinking about.