Donika Kelly


Donika Kelly is an American poet and assistant professor of English at St. Bonaventure University in Allegany, New York. She published a collection of poetry in October 11, 2016 called Bestiary. The book won Kelly several awards including the 2015 Cave Canem prize, the 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the 2018 Tufts Discovery Award.

Biography

Early years

She was born in Los Angeles in the early 1980s and moved with her family to Arkansas in the late 1990s.

Education

In 2005, Kelly received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Southern Arkansas University. She received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Texas in 2008. Her thesis was called The White Meat. In 2009, she obtained a Master of Arts from Vanderbilt University. Her thesis, Framing the Subject in Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia, analyzed Natasha Trethewey's book on Ernest J. Bellocq's photography, specifically those of unnamed mixed-race prostitutes. Kelly finished her Ph.D in English Literature from Vanderbilt University in August 2013. Her dissertation was titled Reading against Genre: Contemporary Westerns and the Problem of White Manhood. In it, Kelly explains how the way in which society perceives the role of white men is largely influenced by the way they are portrayed in media, with a particular focus on contemporary Western films.

Awards and honors

;List of poems
TitleYearFirst publishedReprinted/collected
From the catalogue of cruelty2020

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