Chelsey Minnis

Born in Dallas and raised in Denver, poet Chelsey Minnis received a BA in English from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and studied creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
 
In open-ended poems that question our conceptions of the poetic line, Minnis frequently tackles the world of poetry and its conventions as her subjects, reclaiming unfashionable gestures such as the frequent use of ellipses, exclamation marks, and cantilevered similes. Publishers Weekly, reviewing Poemland, noted that Minnis “mixes the postmodern with the nearly archaic.” As Boston Review critic Sasha Steensen observed of Minnis’s trademark ellipses in a 2009 review of Bad Bad, “Hesitation, resolution, omission, inclusion, decoration, and punctuation, the ellipses are, on the one hand, the bullet-holes that remain after Minnis’s speaker takes shots at the reader. On the other, they are evidence of the unsteadiness of the speaker’s own hand […] embody[ing] the vulnerability that so often lurks behind the book’s defiance.”
 
Minnis is the author of several collections of poetry, including Zirconia (2001), which won the Alberta Prize; Bad Bad (2007); and Poemland (2009). She lives in Boulder.