About

Emma Aylor is the author of Close Red Water (forthcoming October 2023), selected by Tina Chang as winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, AGNI, Colorado Review, Poetry Daily, the Yale Review, Poetry Ireland Review, the Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere, and she received Shenandoah’s 2020 Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. Aylor is currently a PhD candidate and teacher at Texas Tech University; she holds an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle and a BA with highest honors from the College of William & Mary. Originally from Bedford County, Virginia, next to the Blue Ridge Mountains, she lives in Lubbock, Texas, and is at work on a book of poems about art, chronic pain, ekphrasis, and the responsibilities of attention.

photo: Will Durham

Photo of Emma Aylor in profile, reflected in a mirror.