Danusha Laméris

Danusha Laméris is a poet and essayist who was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1971 to a Dutch father and Barbadian mother and raised in Northern California. After graduating from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a BA in art, she studied poetry with poets Ellen Bass, Dorianne Laux, and Joseph Millar.

Laméris is the author of three books of poetry: Blade by Blade (Copper Canyon Press, 2024); Bonfire Opera (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), part of the Pitt Poetry Series, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the winner of the 2021 Northern California Book Award in Poetry; and The Moons of August (Autumn House Press, 2014), chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. 

A Pushcart Prize recipient, Laméris was also selected for the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award in 2020. Her poem “Small Kindnesses” has been shared internationally, translated into several languages, and read and recorded by actress Helena Bonham Carter.

Of her work, Naomi Shihab Nye says: 

Danusha Laméris writes with definitive, savoring power in perfectly well-weighted lines and scenes. Her poems strike deeply, balancing profound loss and new findings, employing a clear eye, a way of being richly alive with appetite and gusto, and a gift [for] distilling experience to find its shining core.

As the 2018–20 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California, Laméris cofounded The Hive Poetry Collective—a radio show, podcast, and event hub. She is on the faculty of Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program and leads the Litfield Writers Community. Laméris lives in West Sonoma County, California.