Alum Donika Kelly fronts Poets & Writers Magazine
Poet Donika Kelly, who received her PhD in English from Vanderbilt, is featured in the November/December 2025 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, following the publication of her third volume of poetry, The Natural Order of Things, from Graywolf Press.
“In a time when escapist fantasies dominate the fiction charts, The Natural Order of Things is not a book written outside of the world but one that engages with it and that dares to ask: Trauma has happened and is happening before our eyes, and healing might not be a place but a never-ending, nonlinear journey, so, then, why laugh? Why make art? Why make love?” the article asks. It continues: “With this collection Kelly says to the reader, Come close, listen, let me tell you why, and let me tell you too why we fight, why we write, why and how we have survived and will keep surviving. The answer? In a word: joy.”
Donika Kelly received her PhD in 2013 and has previously published Bestiary (Graywolf, 2016), which received the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and The Renunciations (Graywolf, 2021), a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
Read the entire profile at Poets & Writers.
Members of the Vanderbilt community can access the article for free through Heard Libraries.