Caroline Harper New

Caroline Harper New (she/her) is the author of A History of Half-Birds (Milkweed Editions, 2024), winner of the 2023 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry. A poet, artist, and anthropologist from Bainbridge, Georgia, her work is rooted in the precarious landscape of the Gulf Coast, where she reckons with love’s potential for violence in the human, natural, and animal worlds. Her interdisciplinary projects have included visual ethnography, translations, paintings, sculptures, short films, and eco-collaborations.

New earned an AB in anthropology from Davidson College and an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she received a Helen Zell Fellowship and an Arts Initiative Creative Careers Residency. Her poems have been published in American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Colorado Review, Palette Poetry, PRISM International, and other publications. 

New won the 2023 Malahat Review Open Season Award, the 2023 Driftwood In-House Poem Contest, the 2023 John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry, a 2022 Robert & Adele Schiff Award, and a 2022 Meader Family Award, among others. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.