Andrew Calis

Andrew Calis is a Palestinian American poet, essayist, and teacher who was born in Montgomery County, Maryland, in 1987. He received a BA in English from Mount St. Mary’s University in 2009. He earned an MA in English from West Virginia University, where he was a teaching assistant and a finalist for the Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award in 2012. He went on to earn a PhD in English from The Catholic University of America in 2018. While there, he was a finalist for the Excellence in Teaching Award in 2016 and won the Capstone Teaching Award in 2017.

Calis’s most recent book, Which Seeds Will Grow? (Paraclete, 2024), was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has been nominated for various other awards, including the Best of the Net, Fare Forward’s poetry prize, and the Zócalo Poetry Prize. In 2025, he was the second-place winner of the Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize. About his second-place winning poem, the judges J. Drew Lanham and Dr. T. Jane Zelikova wrote:

The pacing of “I will let you think the sea / is sacred still. // Perhaps, then, / you will try to save it” plays with urgency, which builds. “The Sea / Is Sacred Still” seems tidal in its inquisitive invitation to sit, to stand, to save. The inquiry into experience is made palpable by words that one feels, especially when reading the poem aloud. Let the lines rise and fall, then slack. The lineation brings to mind the shoreline, then the abysmal and dark depths, and finally the inevitability of all becoming saltwater, again.

Calis lives near Baltimore.