A black woman with her hair tied up smiling in front of blinded windows
Courtesy of the poet.

Ariana Benson (she/they) is a southern Black poet born in Norfolk, Virginia. Their debut collection, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023), won the 2022 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

Benson has received the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, the Porter House Review Poetry Prize, and the 2021 Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. Benson is the winner of a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in Poetry magazine, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.

Benson is a proud alumna of Spelman College, where she facilitates creative writing and storytelling workshops for HBCU students. She strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness in her writing.