Short Bio

Cara Dees (she/her) is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection, What You’ve Been Waiting For, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editors’ Choice Award, and Exorcism Lessons in the Heartland, winner of the Barrow Street Book Prize. She holds a PhD from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA from Vanderbilt University. Her work appears in publications such as The Atlantic, The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, and POETRY Magazine.

Long Bio

Cara Dees (she/her) is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection, What You’ve Been Waiting For, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editors’ Choice Award, and Exorcism Lessons in the Heartland, selected by Ada Limón for the Barrow Street Book Prize. She holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Cincinnati, as well as an M.F.A. from Vanderbilt University. An Assistant Professor of English at Belmont University, she serves as the Director of Graduate Studies for the M.A. and M.F.A. programs of the Department of English.

Her work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as The Atlantic, Best New Poets, Copper Nickel, Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, and POETRY Magazine. Her books have been named as finalists or semifinalists for the Alice James Book Award, Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry, the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, The Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, the St. Lawrence Book Award, and the Autumn House Rising Writers Prize.

Among her awards are Vanderbilt University's Third Year Fellowship and University Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets Prize from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the 2015 Miller Williams Translation Award, a scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the University of Cincinnati’s University Research Council Graduate Stipend Award. Dees has also served as the Vice President of the English Graduate Organization at the University of Cincinnati, an Editorial Assistant at Cincinnati Review, a founding editor and the Managing Editor of The Arkansas International, and the Poetry Co-Editor and Comics Editor of Nashville Review. She was named the runner-up for the Third Coast Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, and she has been nominated for five Pushcart Prizes and the AWP Intro Journals Project.

Dees has taught university courses in English, Creative Writing, Composition, and French, and has taught at Belmont University, the University of Cincinnati, Vanderbilt University, Fisk University, and the University of Arkansas. She has also worked as a high school English teacher in France (recommended to the post by the French-American Fulbright Commission) and an instructor of Creative Writing in multiple extracurricular and nonprofit programs for youth, including the Reading Academy at Vanderbilt, the Arkansas Writers in the Schools Program, the Saturday Academy at Vanderbilt for the Young, and Southern Word.

Currently, Dees is co-founder and co-host of The Nocturne Reading Series (@thenocturneseries), a bi-monthly reading series in Nashville featuring prose and poetry from local writers.