ABOUT
My Bio
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Danusha LamĂ©ris, a poet and essayist, was raised in Northern California, born to a Dutch father and Barbadian mother.Â
Danusha is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize and was honored by the 2020 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. She served as the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California.
Some of her work has been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Orion, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. Her poem Small Kindnesses has been translated to multiple languages, quoted in O Magazine, turned into a short film, and was recently read by actress Helena Bonham Carter. Â
Her first book, The Moons of August (2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award.
Her second book, Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series), was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Award and recipient of the 2021 Northern California Book Award in Poetry.Â
Her third and newest collection, Blade by Blade (2024)  is now available through Copper Canyon Press.
Danusha is currently on the faculty of Pacific University’s low residency MFA program.
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Blade by Blade by Danusha Lameris (Oct., Copper Canyon) refuses grief as isolated by either time or place, with grace and thunder. .... With the observation of Richard Powers and the casual brilliance of Gwendolyn Brooks, the book angles toward each and every subject and environment equally. The calmness with which the speaker catalogs what is gone due to environmental catastrophe and suicide provides a wide lens—not with distance, but specificity. The admirable volume brings on a new style for Lameris, making her poems utterly recognizable.Â
Poetry Northwest
"This elegiac outing from Laméris is a testament to indelible love, offering a maelstrom of memory that briefly resurrects those she mourns. . . . With this magnanimity of spirit, her poems demonstrate a foundation of awe, curiosity, and reverence. . . . Wielding a gift for imagery and threaded with philosophical acuity, Laméris’s voice is incomparable."
Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
"Danusha Laméris writes with definitive, savoring power – in perfectly well-weighted lines and scenes. Her poems strike deeply, balancing profound loss and new finding, employing a clear eye, a way of being richly alive with appetite and gusto, and a gift of distilling experience to find its shining core. Don't miss this stunning first book."
Naomi Shihab Nye
"Bonfire Opera, Danusha Lameris’ ravishing second collection of poems, lives up to its title and then some. In melodic and sumptuous lines, she considers desire, sorrow, beauty and death. This is a collection you will want to keep close, ‘a reminder to begin, again, by listening carefully with the body’s rapt attention.'"
Ellen Bass
