Chelsea Woodard
Chelsea Woodard’s fourth collection, Lentic Systems, has won the 2026 Vassar Miller Prize and is forthcoming from the University of North Texas Press in March of 2027. Her previous book, At the Lepidopterist’s House, won the 2022 Michael Waters Poetry Prize,.the 2024 Poetry by the Sea Book Prize, and the 2025 New Hampshire Literary Award for Excellence in Poetry. Chelsea is the author of two other collections, Vellum (Able Muse Press, 2014) and Solitary Bee (Measure Press, 2016).
Her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Southwest Review, Blackbird, American Arts Quarterly, Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, and other journals. Her poems are included in the anthologies: In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence Press, 2024) and Poetry is Bread (NIrala, 2025). Chelsea has been a Walter E. Dakin fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a resident artist at Vermont Studio Center and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre; she was the recipient of the 2024 Peter Heinegg Literary Award from Union College and holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Texas and an M.F.A. from Johns Hopkins University. She lives in New Hampshire where she teaches yoga and teaches in the English Department at Phillips Exeter Academy.