Madeleine Barnes is a writer, visual artist, Mellon Foundation Humanities Public Fellow, and English PhD student at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She serves as Poetry Editor at Cordella Magazine, co-curates the Lunar Walk Poetry Series, and teaches at Brooklyn College. Her debut full-length poetry collection, You Do Not Have To Be Good, was selected as a winner of Trio House Press’ open reading period to be published in 2020. She is the author of three chapbooks: Women’s Work, forthcoming from Tolsun Books in 2021, Light Experiments, Porkbelly Press’ first ever zine-style photo chapbook, and The Mark My Body Draws in Light.

She is the recipient of a John Woods Scholarship to study poetry in the Czech Republic, a New York State Summer Writers Institute Fellowship, two Academy of American Poets Poetry Prizes, the Princeton Poetry Prize (judged by Paul Muldoon and C.K. Williams), the Gertrude Gordon Journalism Prize, the Three Rivers Review Poetry Prize, and a Lost and Found Light Relief Grant. She was named an Emerging Writer by the Poetry Ireland Introduction Series, and Brooklyn Poets Poet of the Week. Her poem “To Charge Forward” was featured in Frontier’s “Exceptional Poetry from Around the Web” series alongside poetry by former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith.