Traci Brimhall

Traci Brimhall is the author of four collections of poetry: Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon Press, 2020); Saudade (Copper Canyon Press, 2017); Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), selected by Michelle Boisseau for the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Award. Her children’s book, Sophia & The Boy Who Fell, was published by SeedStar Books in March 2017.

Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, New England Review, Ploughshares, Orion The Believer, The Nation, and The New Republic. Her essays have appeared in Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Copper Nickel, and Brevity. Some of her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Best of the Net, PBS Newshour, and Best American Poetry 2013 & 2014. She has also received the Just Desserts Short Fiction Prize from Passages North (selected by Roxane Gay), the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction from Bellingham Review (selected by Sue William Silverman), the Jane Geske Award for poetry from Prairie Schooner (selected by Kwame Dawes), and the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America (selected by Sally Wen Mao).

Her poetry comic collaborations with Eryn Cruft can be found in Guernica, The Poetry Comics, and Nashville Review. Her poetry comic crown of sonnets with Eryn Cruft, The Wrong Side of Rapture, was released through Ninth Letter in the summer of 2013. She is also a co-author of two collaborative chapbooks with Brynn Saito: Bright Power, Dark Peace (Diode Editions, 2013) and Wild Recovery (Tupelo Press, 2020).

She received a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the 2012 Summer Poet in Residence at the University of Mississippi, and the 2008-2009 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Other awards for her work include scholarships and fellowships to the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Writer’s Center of Bethesda, Vermont Studio Center, the Disquiet International Literary Program, and the Arctic Circle Residency.

She holds degrees from Florida State University (BA), Sarah Lawrence College (MFA), and Western Michigan University (PhD). She works as an Associate Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.