Ansel Elkins (she/her)

Ansel Elkins was raised in Talladega, Alabama, from a family of Puerto Rican descent on one side and Alabama sharecroppers on the other. She won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for Blue Yodel (Yale University Press, 2015). Her second book, Dirt Eater, will be published by Ecco/HarperCollins in August 2027. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Scholar, The Atlantic, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Oxford American, The Puerto Rican Literature Project, and others. She is the recipient of the “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, the 2025-2026 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, the 2025 Poetry Society of America Cecil Hemley Award, the 2026 Poetry International Cavafy Prize, and the 2026 Center for Book Arts chapbook competition. She is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Paris Review, the American Academy in Rome, Hedgebrook, Lighthouse Works, and the American Antiquarian Society.

 

You can read sample poems here:

https://poets.org/poem/autobiography-eve

https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/in-their-own-words/ansel-elkins-on-the-girl-with-antlers

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/09/poem-ansel-elkins-all-our-pretty-sons/675352/#

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/12/poem-ansel-elkins-bridge-gods/681184/