Crystal Oliver is a poet and songwriter living in Southern Maryland with particular interests in cultural studies of women songwriters, literary citizenship as community service, and professional literacy. She is a senior lecturer of English, an adjunct professor of Music, the Director of the Chesapeake Writers' Conference, and the Editor-in-Chief at the EcoTheo Review. Her areas of teaching specialization include creative writing, the poetics of song, and feminist and multicultural critical approaches to the literature of music, magic, and addiction. She teaches at St. Mary's College of Maryland and has taught at Pratt Institute, the City University of New York (including Brooklyn College and the Borough of Manhattan Community College), and the College of Southern Maryland. She has released four albums: Fixing to Break (MW Records, 2002), Bessie's Last Stand (2003), Voter (2007), and Light it Up (2012). Her writing has appeared in Gargoyle, EcoTheo Review, Bluestem, The Brooklyn Review, The Delmarva Review, Woman, and Southern Maryland: This Is Living.
Oliver received the 2022 Jordan Teaching Exemplar Award and the 2022 Andy Kozak Faculty Contribution to Student Life Award. She received the Henrietta Spiegel Creative Writing Award from the University of Maryland, College Park, and earned her M.F.A. in Poetry from Brooklyn College.