Clara Collins is a poet and teacher based in Bellingham, Washington. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and is an alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Mississippi Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Radar Poetry, Ellipsis, and elsewhere.

Her poems linger in the charged spaces between tenderness and violence, beauty and discomfort, often exploring girlhood, womanhood, inheritance, and the complicated intimacies that shape us.

She serves as a Staff Reader for Ploughshares and is at work on her first full-length poetry collection. When she is not writing, teaches middle school literature and creative writing.