Reading | Donika Kelly

Donika Kelly is the author of Bestiary, selected by Nikky Finney for the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She holds an MFA in Writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, and in 2013, she received a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University, where she specialized in American literature and film studies. Donika is a Cave Canem Fellow and a 2004 June Fellow of the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. She has facilitated poetry workshops for Nashville Young Writers’ Workshops. Her poems have appeared in various journals including Hayden’s Ferry Review, West Branch, and Indiana Review.

Donika has taught multiple writing classes in English and WGS to majors and non-majors. In her dissertation, Reading Against Genre: Contemporary Westerns and the Problem of White Manhood, she argues that white manhood operates under generic conventions much like those found in westerns, and these conventions encourage us to read white men as a monolith instead of as individuals. She turns to contemporary westerns in order to denaturalize the conventions governing 21st century white manhood that are rooted in the 19th century.