Donika Kelly

Donika Kelly

About Donika Kelly

Donika Kelly is an African-American poet and academic, author of The Renunciations (2021), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry, and Bestiary (2016), the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for poetry, and the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and was longlisted for the National Book Award in 2016 and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a Publishing Triangle Award in 2017. 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 and 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 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. She is also a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa.
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Donika Kelly Poems




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