Bio

Ariana Benson is a southern Black ecopoet. Her debut collection, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023) won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2024 Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and was a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Leonard Prize and the Library of Virginia Prize in Poetry. A Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, Benson has also received the Furious Flower Poetry Prize and the Graybeal Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in POETRY, Callaloo, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Benson is a proud alumna of Spelman College, where she facilitates creative writing and storytelling workshops for students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.