Chelsea Harlan (she / her) is a person who writes poems. Her work considers the bittersweet beauty of being alive. (See also: poetry).
Her debut full-length collection, Bright Shade, was selected by Jericho Brown as the winner of the 2022 American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Prize. Bright Shade is available for purchase from lots of places, best among them directly from APR or from your favorite local bookstore.
She holds a BA in Literature and Visual Art from Bennington College, as well as an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow and a Rose Goldstein Scholar, and where she has enjoyed teaching English and creative writing. She has received artist-in-residence fellowships to the Hambidge Center and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.
Some moons ago she received scholarship to attend the John Ashbery Home School, and she spent one rigorous summer studying landscape architecture at Columbia University. Her chapbook Mummy, written in collaboration with London-based painter Daisy Parris, was released by Montez Press in 2019, and her chapbook Country Music was released in 2021 from Two Plum Press. She received the 2021 Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award from Southwest Review for her poem “Romance Language,” the 2021 Robert Watson Literary Award from The Greensboro Review for her poem “Some Sunlight,” and the 2019-2020 Mikrokosmos Poetry Prize for her poem “Grimaldo’s Chair,” selected by sam sax. Twice named a finalist for Shenandoah’s Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets, her work has been nominated for the Best of the Net and the Weatherford Award (Berea College / Appalachian Studies Association), and she has received perennially generous non-monetary support from the Claytor Nature Center. In partnership with Writing the Land and the Virginia Outdoors Foundation, she is the “Poet Protector” of House Mountain.
She serves as a visiting lecturer in creative writing at Hollins University, assistant director of the Sedalia Center, and co-poetry editor of Raleigh Review. She lives in rural Appalachian Virginia, where she was born and raised, and where she also sometimes works at her childhood public library.
photo by Harrison Siegel