Kelli Russell Agodon

Kelli Russell Agodon is an award-winning poet, writer, and editor from the Pacific Northwest. Her next poetry collection, Accidental Devotions, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in May 2026.

She is the author of five full-length poetry collections, including Dialogues with Rising Tides, a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, and Hourglass Museum, a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards and shortlisted for the Julie Suk Poetry Prize. Her collection Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize, was named ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year in Poetry, and was also a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her other books include Small Knots and Geography, winner of the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award.

Agodon co-authored the bestselling craft book The Daily Poet: Day-by-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice with Martha Silano, co-edited Demystifying the Manuscript: Essays and Interviews on Creating a Book of Poems with Susan Rich, and co-edited Fire On Her Tongue: An Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry with Annette Spaulding-Convy.

Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Nation, Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, and on The Writer’s Almanac, as well as in Garrison Keillor’s anthology Good Poems for Hard Times.

Born and raised in Seattle, Agodon earned her MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop, where she now teaches. She is the co-founder of Two Sylvias Press, where she works as an editor and book designer, and the co-director of Poets on the Coast: A Retreat for Women Poets. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, a ferry ride from Seattle, where she can often be found paddleboarding, hiking, or in conversation with poems.