Donika Kelly Books In Order

Publication Order of Poetry Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

Donika Kelly is an American writer, poet, and academic.

She is known for her work writing the chapbook Aviarium, and three poetry collections: Bestiary, The Renunciations, and The Natural Order of Things.

Born in 1983, she has won a lot of recognition and awards for her work. Her collection The Renunciations won her the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry. Bestiary also received awards and recognition, winning the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.

Her poetry has been a finalist for the Publishing Triangle Awards, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Lambda Literary Awards. It was also longlisted for the National Book Award. She is a National Endowment for the Arts fellow, a Cave Canem graduate fellow, and a Pushcart Prize winner.

Donika has also been the recipient of a Lannan Residency Fellowship and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. She has also received a fellowship to be part of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Donika attended Southern Arkansas University, where she graduated in 2005 with her Bachelor of Arts in English. She attended the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her MFA. She also has an PhD in English that she received from Vanderbilt University. Her poems have been featured and published in places such as The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Foglifter, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and other places.

She has also contributed to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, which was edited by Margaret Busby.

Today Donika is married and resides in Iowa City along with her wife. Her wife is Melissa Febos, a nonfiction writer. She continues to write and works as an associate professor at the University of Iowa in the English Department teaching creative writing. Prior to this, the author taught at the Baruch College at the City University of New York as well as St. Bonaventure University.

Donika was born in the early eighties in Los Angeles, California. In the late nineties, she decided to move with her family to Arkansas. Her family still lives there to this day.

She was a June Fellow in 2004 at the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, was a James A. Michener Fellow in Writing from 2005 to 2008, received a Provost’s Graduate Fellowship from Vanderbilt University from 2008 to 2013 and received a University Fellowship from Vanderbilt University that lasted from 2008 to 2013. Vanderbilt also gave her the Thomas Daniel Young Award for Excellence in Teaching and a Bayard Rustin Advocacy Award from the Office of LGBTQI Life.

Bestiary: Poems is a 2016 work by Donika Kelly. This is the first book from this writer and it’s one that you won’t want to miss. These poems are full of legendary beasts, animals, and mythological monsters that are part human and part other things. The result is a fascinating and thematic work that you’ll definitely want to add to your bookshelf collection.

This book is a catalog of various creatures that exist, from the ostrich and the whale to the chimera, centaur, pegasus, and griffin. These poems feature theme such as travel, self-discovery, and love. The book also includes a sequence where it is questioned who or what is the monster inside of this life of reflection and survival.

The book features an introduction written by Nikky Finney, the National Book Award winner. The poems are unique in every single way and make the reader of them take another look at just what it is that ends up making us human and whole at the end of the day. Grab yourself a copy of Bestiary to experience every word for yourself.

The Renunciations: Poems is a 2021 collection of poems by Donika Kelly. They are poems that feature themes of transformation and endurance, penned by an award-winning writer. If you’ve been looking for something that you can read all at once or leaf through and take in parts, this is a great pick.

This is a book full of wonderful poems that explore themes of survival, being resilient, and the journey to shift one’s sense of self while dealing with trauma. Donika makes her way through a childhood that is punctuated by love and abuse and into the marriage of that child who has now grown up.

The result is an in depth charting of memory and the body as landscapes that need to be traversed and tended to. The poems create life rafts and sanctuaries, going over what people can bear and showing how families can sometimes harm themselves. Remembering here can become a cure as personal mythologies end up making way for a future that is more defined by possibility than wounds.

This is an incredible collection where Donika Kelly explores whether we are able to make it through challenging times by building homes that are inside of themselves or whether a legacy of trauma can ever be escaped. Check out this thought-provoking work by getting a copy of The Renunciations today.