Stella Hayes is the author of two poetry collections, Father Elegies (What Books Press, 2024) and One Strange Country (What Books Press, 2020). She grew up in Brovary, a suburb outside of Kyiv, Ukraine, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Hayes earned an M.F.A. in poetry from NYU, where she taught in the undergraduate creative writing program and served as poetry editor and assistant fiction editor of Washington Square Review. Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, The Poetry Project, Four Way Review, Stanford University Press, and Spillway, among others. Hayes is a contributing editor at Tupelo Quarterly.
Bio
She began her life in a book-filled home in an agricultural town an hour outside of Kiev, then part of the Soviet Union. In 1978, her family of five — her father excluded — left for the U.S., settling first in Chicago.
At USC, she studied creative writing with a focus on poetry with celebrated poet David St. John. More recently, she has taken advanced classes in poetry and fiction at 92Y and was asked to do a reading there in the spring of 2018. She earned an M.F.A. in poetry from NYU in 2023. Stella's first collection, One Strange Country, was recently selected by Carlie Hoffman, winner of the National Jewish Book Award for this month's Jewish Book Council round-up featuring women writers for National Women's Month, and has received praise from Publisher's Weekly, Ecotheo Review, and Tinderbox Editions. Of the collection, Erika Wright says: "At turns gleeful and elegiac, grateful and defiant, this book considers the state of exile." Elena Karina Byrne poignantly states: "Between action & mediation the poet discovers a new country where belonging is a necessary part of survival.
