2025-2026 Diann Blakely Visiting Poet & Judge

Karla Kelsey

Kelsey visited Athens between November 11-12, 2025 for a series of events as part of the Blakely Program. In the spring, Kelsey judged the entries in the 2025-2026 Diann Blakely National Poetry Competition for Emerging Poets.

Karla Kelsey is poet and essayist whose work weaves together the lyric with philosophy and history. Her poetry books include On Certainty (Omnidawn, 2023), Blood Feather (Tupelo Press, 2020), A Conjoined Book (Omnidawn, 2014), Iteration Nets (Ahsahta, 2010), and Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary (Ahsahta, 2006) selected by Carolyn Forché for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize. Her book of experimental essays, Of Sphere, was selected by Carla Harryman for the 2016 Essay Press Prize and was published in 2017. She is the editor of Lost Writings: Two Novels by Mina Loy, (Yale University Press in 2024). Her poet’s novel, Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy was recently released from Winter Editions.

Poems and prose have been published by such journals as Bomb, Fence, Conjunctions, New American Writing, The Boston Review, Verse, and Tupelo Quarterly. Her critical essays on poetry, poetics, and pedagogy have appeared in anthologies and literary journals.

From 2010-2017 she edited Constant Critic, Fence Books' online journal of poetry reviews. She currently co-publishes with Aaron McCollough SplitLevel Texts, a press specializing in hybrid genre projects. With Poupeh Missaghi she edited the first volume of Matters of Feminist Practice, a journal of feminist criticism published by Belladonna* Collaborative. An H.D. Fellow at Yale University’s Beinecke Library and the recipient of a Fulbright Scholars grant, she has taught in Budapest, Hungary, and is Professor of Creative Writing at Susquehanna University.

2025-2026 Winning Poem
Selected by Karla Kelsey

"A Pathogenesis of the First Slave Ship"

by Gabriel Awuah Mainoo

bring me to where
my blood runs
—Wanda Coleman

…this is a water story sprout out of dust.
a red crowded chrysanthemum disperses
on the shores like secrets of a nun’s
threadbare pillow. let their picnic be merry

like vultures circling a leopard’s liver.
the parables unfold from wrinkles of an antique
sun. before we were taken, we mastered
the elements of sky; how to nod to choreography

of torrents, the anatomy of gull flight, the way
it slowly glides left & spears out its talon
to caution. mama was a trader & that night
gave up her ingathering for a mirror. the merchant
said the mirror was holy, had crossed the Red Sea;

anything she raises to the surface will fatten &
multiply. faith beaten out of a chameleon skin.
a dead lizard lying naked by the roadside, shows
God his swollen stomach, blameless; that it did

not eat the bug that makes the loam fertile.
that is how a man proves his innocence.
stands naked under a palm tree & eats dry gentian
root until a white butterfly folds into his right ear.

let their picnic be merry like vultures circling
a leopard’s liver. i know this merchant who
brought the bible before─ mugged my brother
of diamond seeds. after, taught me to pray without

imagining the thief’s blood warming in between
the cold of my knuckles. instructed us to rinse
ourselves with rain, caught sacredly in a gourd;
the purity through which God looks & whittles
a man out of a child’s rib.

let their picnic be merry like vultures circling
a leopard’s liver. i watched you drink the air,
belly full─ watched famished travelers walk on
their heads with bundles of bones thirsty for
air & soil. let their picnic be merry like vultures

circling a leopard’s liver. the carcass smells of
distant places, like odor of yellow light breaking
in the eyes of nervous men who carry the brain of
this poem. let their picnic be merry like vultures

circling a leopard’s liver. let their picnic be
merry like vultures circling a leopard’s liver.
let their picnic be merry. this is a water story
sprout out of dust.

a red crowded chrysanthemum disperses on
the shores like secrets of a nun’s threadbare
pillow. let their picnic be merry like vultures
circling a leopard’s liver. let their picnic be merry…

Gabriel Awuah Mainoo

Gabriel Awuah Mainoo is a Ghanaian creative practitioner. He has received fellowships from the Hong Kong Baptist University, Aarhus Literature Center in Denmark, the Library of Africa, and the African Diaspora, Wintertuin Curacao, and others. He is a grant recipient of the Danish Art Foundation through the South Gate Creative Writing School. Mainoo is the author of “Lyrical Textiles’’ (Illuminated Press, U.S.), ‘‘We are Moulting Birds’’ (Light Factory Publication, Canada), and a co-author of "Hvor End Havet Skyller Dig Op" (Forlaget Silkerfyret, Denmark). His awards include the Africa Haiku Prize, the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora chapbook prize, the Singapore Poetry Prize, the 6th Ghana Association of Writers Literary Awards, the Samira Bawumia Literature Prize, the 1st Wanjohi Prize for African Poetry, and others. He edits poetry for The Journal of African Youth Literature. His craft can be found in The London Reader, The New Orleans Review, Fiyah Magazine, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Fire, Wales Haiku Journal, The Woodward Review and others. Mainoo was a headline poet at the Lyra Bristol Poetry Festival in England (2024) under the auspices of Bath Spa University, Ashesi University and the Arts Council of England.

Harriett Diann Blakely was an American poet, essayist, editor and critic. She taught at Belmont University, Harvard University, Vanderbilt University, The Watkins Art Institute, and served as the first poet-in-residence at the Harpeth Hall School in Nashville, Tennessee. A Robert Frost Fellow and Bread Loaf, she was a Dakin Williams Fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She won two Pushcart Prizes and has been anthologized in numerous volumes, including Best American Poetry 2003. She was a recipient of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America and won the 7th Annual Publication Prize from Elixir Press. Her published works including Hurricane Walk, Farwell, My Lovelies, Rain in Our Door: Duets with Robert Johnson, and Each Fugitive Moment: Essays, Memoirs, and Elegies on Lynda Hull. Sadly, her life ended all too soon in August 2014.

In her Last Will and Testament, it was her wish that the executor of her estate should give a portion of her remaining property "to a University to establish an annual poetry publication prize." In addition to the poetry prize, the fund provides financial support to host the Diann Blakely Visiting Poet each year, raising the level of interest in poetry on campus and in the wider community of Athens, Georgia through a variety of events. The Blakely Archive was established this year to catalogue each visiting poet and winning poem, in accordance with her wishes. Visit The Blakely Archive

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