Donika Kelly

Donika Kelly is the author of The Natural Order of Things (Graywolf Press, 2025); The Renunciations (Graywolf Press, 2021), a winner of the 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry; Aviarium (fivehundred places, 2017) and Bestiary (Graywolf Press, 2016), winner of the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for Poetry, and the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Bestiary was also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in 2017, and long-listed for the National Book Award in 2016.

A Cave Canem Fellow, as well as a graduate and founding member of the collective Poets at the End of the World, Kelly is an assistant professor of English at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City. Kelly was a Guest Editor of Poem-a-Day in August 2022.