Bio

Cara Dees is the author of the poetry collection, 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, an M.F.A. from Vanderbilt University, and a B.A. in English with Comprehensive Honors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also graduated first in the College of Letters & Science. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Belmont University.

Her work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as The Atlantic, Best New Poets, Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, and Washington Square Review. Exorcism Lessons in the Heartland was also named a finalist or semifinalist for the 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. She 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 three Pushcart Prizes and the AWP Intro Journals Project.

Dees has taught university courses in English, Creative Writing, Composition, and French, and has taught at the University of Cincinnati, Vanderbilt University, Fisk University, and the University of Arkansas. In addition, she has 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.