Donika Kelly, a black woman, stands outside facing the sun.

Photo by Ladan Osman

Donika Kelly is the author of the full-length collections The Natural Order of Things (Graywolf, 2025), The Renunciations (Graywolf, 2021), and Bestiary (Graywolf, 2016), and the chapbook Aviarium (500 Places, 2017). Bestiary was the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for poetry, and the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. It was also long listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kelly is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and Pushcart Prize winner. She earned her MFA in Writing from the Michener Center for Writers and a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. Kelly teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa.