Chelsea B. DesAutels is the author of A Dangerous Place (Sarabande Books, 2021), which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and described by Publishers Weekly as a “lush and transformative debut” (starred review). Chelsea has received fellowships from the Anderson Center at Tower View, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, and others, and was a previous winner of the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize from the Missouri Review. Chelsea’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Copper Nickel, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and elsewhere, and her poem “City Lake” was featured by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón on The Slowdown podcast.

Chelsea is the founder Freshwater Writing. She lives with her family in Minneapolis. Chelsea earned her MFA from the University of Houston, where she was the recipient of the Inprint Verlaine Prize in Poetry and served as Poetry Editor of Gulf Coast. Chelsea also holds degrees from the University of Minnesota Law School and Wellesley College. You can find her on Twitter @cbdesautels.