Puhak, Shelley

Shelley Puhak is a poet and writer from Maryland. Her second book, Guinevere in Baltimore (Waywiser, 2013), was selected by Charles Simic for the Anthony Hecht Prize, and her first, Stalin in Aruba (Black Lawrence Press, 2010) was awarded the Towson Prize for Literature. Her poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Shenandoah, and Verse Daily, and her prose has been published in The Atlantic, The Iowa Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her nonfiction debut, The Dark Queens, was published by Bloomsbury in early 2022. In Harbinger: Poems (Ecco), a 2021 National Poetry Series selection, Puhak’s works reflect the many facets of the artistic self and the myriad influences and experiences that contribute to that identity. Seen through the lens of motherhood, working as a waitress, watching election results come in, or simply sitting in a waiting room, those events become deeply personal but also unfailingly political. Harbinger shows us the reality of the constantly evolving and unstable self, a portrait of the artist as fragmentary, impressionable, and always in flux.