Cara Dees

Biography

Dr. Cara Dees (PhD, University of Cincinnati; MFA, Vanderbilt University) is an Assistant Professor of English. She specializes in Creative Writing, contemporary American poetry, and feminist poetics. She additionally holds a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Cincinnati and a B.A. in English with Comprehensive Honors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is particularly passionate about intersections of poetry with feminist theory and queer theory, modernist literature, the health humanities, ecopoetics, and rural women's writing. Her book, Exorcism Lessons in the Heartland (Barrow Street Press, 2019), won the Barrow Street Book Prize and was named a finalist or semifinalist for the Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry, the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, The Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, the St. Lawrence Book Award, and the Autumn House Rising Writers Prize. She has also served as an Editorial Assistant at Cincinnati Review, a founding editor and the Managing Editor of The Arkansas International, and the Poetry Co-Editor and Comics Editor of Nashville Review. Her work appears in publications such as The Atlantic, Best New Poets, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry Daily.