Headshot of poet Dara Elerath
Photo courtesy of the poet

Dara Yen Elerath is a mixed-race, Chinese American writer whose debut collection, Dark Braid (BkMk Press, 2020), won the 2019 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry and was longlisted for the 2020 Julie Suk Award. Her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, the American Poetry Review, AGNI, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series. She was born in California and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Elerath earned an MFA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.