About

(the long bio)

Kinsale Drake is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Poetry, Best New Poets, The Atlantic, Poets.org, Poetry Northwest, The Slowdown, Black Warrior Review, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Online, Poetry Unbound, 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 and was named a Southwest Book of the Year, among other honors.

From 2017-2018, she served as a National Student Poet representing the West, appointed by the Library of Congress and the President’s Committee on the Arts & Humanities, selected from annual open submissions to the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. As part of her year of service, she read at the Library of Congress, Carnegie Hall, and Aspen Ideas Festival and promoted a love of poetry in her region. In 2018, she taught a spring poetry workshop for Sherman Indian School in Riverside, CA, where her maternal great-grandparents were relocated to attend residential school. 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. Her English thesis later became her debut poetry collection, The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket, selected by the National Poetry Series and Jacqueline Trimble for University of Georgia Press (2024). Her Ed. Studies research and proposed project on retaining Indigenous students in higher education + Indigenous feminist literary programs was awarded a Collective Abundance award from First Peoples Fund, which became NDN Girls Book Club, an organization founded by Indigenous educators & youth that has distributed to date nearly 40,000 free books by Indigenous authors for free to families & tribal communities. Book Club is guided by a team that believes that storytelling, kinship, and radical imagination are key to our collective wellbeing.

As an educator, Drake has served as a guest faculty member for the Emerging Diné Writers Institute (EDWI) through Navajo Technical University since 2022. She is currently a Russell G. Hamilton Scholar and Provost’s Graduate Fellow at Vanderbilt University, where she pursues her MFA and teaches creative writing. While at Vanderbilt, she has served as an Editor of the Nashville Review. Her research and writing as a graduate fellow has been awarded fellowships from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Sewanee Writers Conference, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.

Kinsale edited Changing Wxman Collective and currently directs programming for NDN Girls Book Club.

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.