Ansel Elkins

Ansel Elkins is from Talladega, Alabama. Her first book, Blue Yodel, won the 2014 Yale Younger Poets Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, The Atlantic, The Believer, LA Review of Books Quarterly, The New York Review of Books, Oxford American, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and others. She has been the recipient of a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, North Carolina Arts Council, Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and the James Merrill House. She teaches creative writing at Berea College, and is the 2025–2026 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholar.