Danusha Laméris

Danusha Laméris is a poet and an essayist born to a Dutch father and a Barbadian mother and raised in Northern California. Her first book, The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), won the 2013 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2015 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. She is also the author of Bonfire Opera (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Award and a winner of the 2021 Northern California Book Award. 

Laméris’s poems have been published in The Best American Poetry, the New York Times, The American Poetry Review, the Gettysburg Review, The Sun, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, and Poetry magazine. Her essays and interviews appear in Orion, Poets & Writers, and The American Scholar. 

Laméris is the recipient of the 2020 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. As the 2018–2020 Santa Cruz, California, Poet Laureate, Laméris cofounded The Hive Poetry Collective. She teaches in Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program.