Kelly Grace Thomas is a poet, writer, educator, and an ocean-obsessed Aries from Jersey. She is the author of Future Tense (forthcoming from Alice James Books, 2026) and Boat Burned (YesYes Books, 2020). She is the winner of the Jane Underwood Poetry Prize and the Neil Postman Award for Metaphor. Kelly’s poems have appeared in: The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets, 32 Poems, Los Angeles Review, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. Kelly has received fellowships from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and Kenyon Review Young Writers’ Workshop. Kelly is also the co-author of poetry curriculums Voices in Verse: Poetry, Identity, and Ethnic Studies; Stanzas of America: Celebrating BIPOC Poetry; and Words Ignite: Explore, Write, and Perform Classic and Spoken Word Poetry (Get Lit), which are currently taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Kelly is a Blackburn Fellow in the Randolph College MFA program. She lives in Benicia, California, where she teaches poetry workshops online. She is currently working on her first novel and memoir. www.kellygracethomas.com

"Kelly Grace Thomas’s Future Tense asks questions about how we build families—and, importantly, why—looking directly at what happens when culturally ingrained narratives of domestic 'success' break down. As they reckon with infertility—a deep, unrequited desire to have a child—and, in parallel time, the death of the poet’s mother from cancer, these poems confront the fragility of life, strange biological realities, and what can and can’t be controlled. Unsentimental, lyrically honest, and dialed into the complexities of grief, these poems destigmatize that which is most fraught about our bodies. They construct a world in which a so-called 'failure' to create new life activates a creative impulse strong enough to make life new."
—Jane Huffman, author of Public Abstract