Donika Kelly is the author of the chapbook Aviarium and the full-length poetry collections The Renunciations (Graywolf), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry, and Bestiary (Graywolf), the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Kelly’s poetry has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and longlisted for the National Book Award.

A Cave Canem graduate fellow, National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and founding member of the collective Poets at the End of the World, she has also received a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. She earned her BA in English from Southern Arkansas University, an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University.

Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.

Courses taught

Foundations of Creative Writing
Advanced Creative Writing: Special Topic
Honors Seminar in Poetry

BUILD workshops

Beyond the Numbers
A Closer Look at Race in America
An Introduction to Federal Regulations Affecting International Students

Research interests

Contemporary American Poetry; African American Poetry and Poetics; Ecopoetics