Destiny O. Birdsong reading

Destiny O. Birdsong is a Louisiana-born poet, essayist, and fiction writer whose work has either appeared or is forthcoming in the Paris Review Daily, Poets & Writers, Catapult, The Best American Poetry 2021, and elsewhere. Her critical work has appeared in African American Review and The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature. Destiny has won the Academy of American Poets Prize and has received support from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Pink Door, MacDowell, The Ragdale Foundation, and Tin House, where she was a 2018 Summer Workshop Scholar. Her debut poetry collection, Negotiations, was published by Tin House Books in October 2020, and was longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection. Her debut novel, Nobody’s Magic, was published by Grand Central in February 2022. She earned her BA in English and history from Fisk University, and her MFA and PhD from Vanderbilt. In 2022, she was selected as the Hurston-Wright Foundation’s inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Rutgers University-Newark, and she will serve as an Artist-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville for 2022-2023.