Celia Gilbert is the author of several books of poetry, including Bonfire (Alice James Books) and Queen of Darkness (Viking Press). Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The New Yorker, Southwest, and Grand Street. She is the winner of a Discovery Award and a Pushcart Prize IX. The Poetry Society of America awarded her both an Emily Dickinson Prize and a Consuelo Ford Award, and her work has been frequently anthologized. Celia Gilbert grew up in Washington D.C. She received a B.A. from Smith College and an M.A. from Boston University and was Poetry and Fiction Editor of The Boston Phoenix. After living abroad in England and France, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

”From deep places, these poems allow things to well up: memory, love, fear, and a sense of how our individual natures belong to the same great nature which keeps pushing life forward out of death…In ‘Lot’s Wife’ and other poems, Gilbert reinvents mythology, bringing it closer to the realities we recognize.”
—Alicia Ostriker