Photo credit: Josh Theus
Cass Donish was born and raised in Greater Los Angeles. Their most recent poetry collection, Your Dazzling Death (Knopf, 2024), won the Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award and was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award.
Donish's two previous collections are The Year of the Femme (University of Iowa Press, 2019), chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy as winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Julie Suk Award; and Beautyberry (Slope Editions, 2018). Their nonfiction chapbook, On the Mezzanine (Gold Line Press, 2019), was chosen by Maggie Nelson as winner of the Gold Line Press Chapbook Competition. An interdisciplinary writer, educator, and performer, Donish has writing appearing or forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Gettysburg Review, Guernica, The Offing, Pleiades, Poem-a-Day, Texas Review, Tupelo Quarterly, VICE, and elsewhere.
Donish holds a BA in English and Comparative Religions from the University of Washington. After taking seven years away from school, during which they taught ESL in Prague and San Francisco and worked as an editor for an educational software company in Seattle, they earned an MA in cultural geography from the University of Oregon, where they researched the ways in which diverse artists and grassroots art spaces contest gentrification in San Francisco's Mission District. Their research complicates the dominant narrative that the arts contribute to gentrifying processes, illuminating how this narrative tends to center white artists and newcomers, erasing BIPOC artists, culture workers, and long-standing community members who are engaged in creative and spatial forms of community empowerment.
A founding editor of The Spectacle, Donish earned an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where they received an Olin Fellowship, served as the Junior Fellow in Poetry, and later returned as an invited Guest Lecturer. They earned a PhD in English from the University of Missouri, specializing in queer and feminist ecologies and ecopoetics. Currently, they are particularly interested in the discourses around elegy and anti-elegy. Their poetry and essays explore the interconnections between grief, ecology, gender, traumatic loss, healing, and relationships with place. Donish has taught creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis, Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop, Ashland University's low-residency MFA program, Seattle's Hugo House, and Portland's McCormack Writing Center (formerly Tin House Workshops). They live in Columbia, Missouri, where they are Writer-in-Residence at the University of Missouri and co-founder of Nightjar Arts Collective.
Donish's work was formerly published under the name Cassie Donish.
Email: cassdonish { a t } gmail { d o t } com
Representation: Julia Eagleton