Biography
Donika Kelly is award-winning poet who was born in Los Angeles and moved with her family to Arkansas as a child. Known for her searing, lyrical poems, Kelly is the author of The Renunciations, which reckons with a legacy of childhood abuse. The Renunciations won the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry. Bestiary, Kelly’s first collection, won the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Kelly’s devastating, gorgeous collections—a New York Times reviewer called her “a descendant of Sylvia Plath by way of the wintry Louise Glück”—have been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and longlisted for the National Book Award. She lives in Iowa City with her wife, the nonfiction writer Melissa Febos, and is an assistant professor at the University of Iowa, teaching creative writing.