Ansel Elkins’s debut collection of poetry, Blue Yodel, was selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2014 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition (forthcoming in April 2015). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The Believer, Best New Poets 2011, Ecotone, Guernica, Gulf Coast, the North American Review, the Southern Review, and others. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, an American Antiquarian Society Fellowship, and the “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize. She holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence College and University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Born in rural Alabama, she now lives in North Carolina.