ABOUT

Gisselle Yepes is a Puerto Rican and Colombian poet, educator, and storyteller from the Bronx. Their autobiographical work is rooted in the intimate relationships between grief, memory, and silence within familial dynamics and domestic spheres. Yepes’ work highlights grief’s illegibility to emphasize how grieving is an undoing which makes space for love too.

 

Yepes is a proud alum of the New York City public school system,  who received their MFA in Creative Writing at Indiana University Bloomington, where they received the 2021 Vera Meyer Strube Prize with the Academy of American Poets. They hold a B.A. from Wesleyan University, where they earned the Winchester Fellowship, the Sophie and Anne Reed Prize, and the award for Connecticut Poetry Laureate. They are a Letras Boricuas 2022 Fellowship Recipient, Tin House Scholar, and Sundress Academy of the Arts Resident. Their nonfiction piece “On Her Waters Summoning Us to Drown” won december magazine’s 2022 Curt Johnson Prose Award in Creative Nonfiction. They are an alum of Juniper Summer Writing Institute, Anaphora Writing Residency, and DreamYard's Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium. 

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Their manuscript DESAHÓGATE was selected as semifinalist by Douglas Kearney for the Philip Levine Poetry Prize for Poetry. Their poetry has appeared in De Los x LA Times, Willow Springs, ANMLY,  MoMa Magazine, Split this Rock, Apogee Journal, Gulf  Coast, Poets.org, The Missouri Review, iō Literary Journal, Voicemail Poems, and PALABRITAS. Their nonfiction has appeared in december magazine. Their film was featured on Roku via the "GIPHYxPublic Axis" Roku Channel and GIPHY.

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Currently, they are teaching middle schoolers ELA en el barrio.