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