Donika Kelly

Donika Kelly is an American poet born in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, known for her poetry collections Bestiary (2016), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and Kate Tufts Discovery Award; The Renunciations (2021), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Natural Order of Things (2025), [University of Iowa]. She holds degrees from Southern Arkansas University, University of Texas at Austin, and Vanderbilt University, and teaches creative writing as an associate professor at the University of Iowa, [Iowa Now]. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere, earning fellowships from Cave Canem, NEA, and Lannan [Poets.org].