Ariana Benson was born in Norfolk, Virginia. Their debut collection, Black Pastoral, won the 2022 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from University of Georgia Press in September 2023. A recipient of the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, Benson's poems appear or are forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Through her writing, she strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness.