Danielle Badra received her BA in Creative Writing from Kalamazoo College (2008) and her MFA in Poetry from George Mason University (2017). While there, she was the poetry editor of So To Speak, a feminist literary and arts journal, and an intern for Split This Rock. Her poems have appeared in Mizna, Cincinnati Review, The Maynard, Outlook Springs, 45th Parallel, The California Journal of Poetics, Duende, The Greensboro Review, Bad Pony, Rabbit Catastrophe Press, Split This Rock, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and elsewhere. Dialogue with the Dead (Finishing Line Press, 2015) is her first chapbook, a collection of contrapuntal poems in dialogue with her deceased sister.

In addition to teaching undergraduate composition, literature, and poetry at George Mason University, she has led writing workshops at The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Split This Rock Poetry Festival, OutWrite DC, and in high schools. She has been a featured reader for Split This Rock’s Sunday Kind of Love series, a judge for Brave New Voices in DC and for Poetry Out Loud in Richmond, and a participant in Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here (a festival commemorating the 2007 bombing of a historic book market in Baghdad, Iraq).

Her manuscript, Like We Still Speak, was selected by Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara as the winner of the 2021 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize and published through the University of Arkansas Press fall 2021. It was named a semi-finalist for the Khayrallah Prize and listed in Entropy’s “Best of 2020-2021: Poetry Books & Poetry Collections.” The book is reviewed here in the Washington Independent Review of Books and is given a deep-dive closer look here in this interview in the University of Arizona Poetry Center Blog: 1508.

Danielle will be serving as the Fairfax County Poet Laureate from 2022-2024. You can learn more about her “Poetry in the Parks” project here.