Kinsale Drake is a Diné poet/editor/playwright whose work has appeared in Poetry, Best New Poets, Poets.org, Poetry Northwest, The Slowdown, Black Warrior Review, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Online, Yale Literary Magazine, TIME, NPR, MTV, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, THE SKY WAS ONCE A DARK BLANKET (University of Georgia Press, 2024), won the 2023 National Poetry Series.
From 2017-2018, she served as a National Student Poet, appointed by the Library of Congress and the President’s Committee on the Arts & Humanities. She received three national gold medals for her writing through the Art & Writing Awards and performed her work at the Library of Congress, Carnegie Hall, and Aspen Ideas Festival. In 2018, she was a poetry workshop instructor for Sherman Indian School in Riverside, CA. From 2022-2023, she was appointed as a judge for the national Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.
Kinsale graduated from Yale in 2022 with B.A.s in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and English, where she received the Susan O’Connor Award, fellowships from Mellon Mays and the Richter Fund, the J. Edgar Meeker Prize, the Academy of American Poets Prize, and the Young Native Playwrights Award. She was a Bucknell June Poets Fellow and an inaugural Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow in 2022. She has served as a guest faculty member for the Emerging Diné Writers Institute (Navajo Technical University) since 2022.
Kinsale edited Changing Wxman Collective and currently directs NDN Girls Book Club, a nonprofit organization that promotes Indigenous literature on every level.
She is the recipient of the 2023 Adroit Prize for Poetry, the Joy Harjo Poetry Award, and was the 2023 Aspen Institute Poetry Fellow. She has performed at Carnegie Hall twice, in 2018 and 2023. In addition, Kinsale has been recognized as a 2022 Yahoo! “In The Know” Changemaker, one of The Sunday Paper’s 2023 Changemakers, and one of Time’s People Changing How We See the World curated by filmmaker Ava Duvernay.