The Puerto Rican Literature Project

Ansel Elkins was born in Alabama in 1982. She received her BA in liberal arts from Sarah Lawrence College in 2007 and her MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2009. Her first poetry book, Blue Yodel (2015), won the Yale Series Younger Poets Prize in 2014. Elkins has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. Her literary influences include Walt Whitman, Margaret Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and Martín Espada, among others. She was awarded the 2011 “Discovery”/ Boston Review Prize (later known as the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center Discovery Poetry Prize) and the 2012 James Hearst Poetry Prize from the North American Review. Her work has been published in The American Scholar, The Believer, Oxford American, Parnassus, among others. Currently, she teaches creative writing at Berea College.
 

Works Cited

Elkins, Jane Ansel. Interview. Conducted by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, 28 Feb. 2023.

Elkins, Jane Ansel. Author Questionnaire. El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña, 2024.