Professional and Biographical Information

Kirun Kapur is the winner of the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize in Poetry and the Antivenom Poetry Award for her first book, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist (Elixir Press, 2015). Her second collection, Women in the Waiting Room (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and was included in the Best Books of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews. Named an “Asian-American poet to watch” by NBC News, her work has appeared in AGNI, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares and many other journals. She has been granted fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio Center and MacDowell Colony. Kapur serves as the editor at The Beloit Poetry Journal, one of the nation’s oldest poetry publications. She teaches at Amherst College, where she is director of the Creative Writing Program. Learn more at kirunkapur.com.