Donika Kelly

Donika Kelly (born 1983) is an American poet and academic. She is the author of the chapbook Aviarium and three full-length poetry collections Bestiary (2016), The Renunciations (2021), and The Natural Order of Things (2025).

Early life and education Kelly was born in Los Angeles, California in the early 1980s and moved with her family to Arkansas in the late 1990s. Her family still lives there. She received a Master of Fine Arts from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin in 2008.

In 2009, she obtained a Master of Arts from Vanderbilt University. Her thesis, Framing the Subject in Natasha Trethewey's Bellocq's Ophelia, analyzed Natasha Trethewey's book on Ernest J. Bellocq's photography, specifically those of unnamed mixed-race prostitutes. Kelly finished her Ph.D. in English literature from Vanderbilt University in August 2013, where she specialized in American literature and film studies.

Career Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Foglifter, The Paris Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

Bestiary is the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. It was longlisted for the National Book Award in 2016. It was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a Publishing Triangle Award in 2017.

The Renunciations won the 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry. It was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.

Kelly is a Cave Canem Foundation Graduate Fellow. She is the recipient of a Lannan Residency fellowship and a fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Kelly is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing. She has previously taught at the City University of New York's Baruch College and St. Bonaventure University.

Personal life She lives in Iowa with her wife, the writer Melissa Febos.

Awards and honors National Book Award, Longlist, 2016 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry, 2023 Pushcart Prize, 2025