Ansel Elkins was born in Alabama. She earned her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her first collection of poetry, Blue Yodel (2015), won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Elkins’s poetry, in her own words, “explores the South as a complex place of racial violence and isolation, but also familial love.” Elkins’s poems have appeared in magazines and journals such as The Believer, Best New Poets (2011), Guernica, Gulf Coast, and the Southern Review, among others.
 
Elkins is the recipient of a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, the James Hearst Poetry Prize, and the Fugue Ron McFarland Prize for Poetry. She has received fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky where she is currently the visiting writer-in-residence at the University of Kentucky.