Long Bio

Dr. Holli Carrell, Ph.D. (she/they), is a writer originally from Utah, currently residing in Cincinnati. She is the author of Apostasies, winner of the 2025 Perugia Press Prize for New Women Poets. She holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature, as well as a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Cincinnati, where she was awarded a 2024–2025 Taft Research Center Dissertation Fellowship. Her research focuses on U.S. and Anglophone feminist poetics of the late 19th to 21st centuries, documentary poetics, eco-poetics, queer theory, and Mormon studies. She additionally holds an M.F.A. from Hunter College and completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Utah.

Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in journals including Fence, Gulf Coast, 32 Poems, North American Review, Poetry Northwest, The Journal, Bennington Review, and Ninth Letter, among others. Apostasies was additionally recognized as a finalist and semifinalist for the Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes and the Jake Adam York Prize.

Her honors include a Norma Lubetsky Friedman Scholarship for Poetry, the Jean Chimsky Poetry Prize, a New York State’s Writers’ Institute scholarship, and the University Research Council’s Graduate Stipend Award from the University of Cincinnati. Carrell’s writing has been a finalist for The Brink Literary Journal Award for Hybrid Writing, the Greg Grummer Poetry Contest, River Styx’s International Poetry Contest, and an Academy of American Poets Graduate Prize. Additionally, she was named a semifinalist for the 92nd Street Y “Discovery” Award and is a three-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize.

Carrell has served as a poetry reader for Ploughshares, assistant editor of poetry and nonfiction for The Cincinnati Review, and is currently a manuscript reader for Acre Books. She has taught university courses in creative writing, literature, film studies, composition, and screenwriting at both Hunter College and the University of Cincinnati.

Short Bio

Holli Carrell (she/they) is the author of Apostasies, winner of the 2025 Perugia Press Prize. She holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Cincinnati— where she was a 2024-2025 Taft Research Center Dissertation Fellow— as well as an M.F.A. from Hunter College. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Fence, Gulf Coast, 32 Poems, Poetry Northwest, The Journal, Bennington Review, and Ninth Letter, among others. She currently serves as a manuscript reader for Acre Books.