Ansel Elkins was raised in Talladega County, Alabama. She won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for Blue Yodel (Yale University Press, 2015), and her second book will be published by Ecco in 2027. Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, The Atlantic, The Believer, The New York Review of Books, Oxford American, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She won the 2026 Center for Book Arts chapbook contest. She teaches at Berea College in Kentucky.
