Mary-Alice Daniel was born near the Niger/Nigeria border, then raised in England and Tennessee. A cross-genre author, she has published poetry, critical and lyric essays, and literary translations in New England Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, The Hopkins Review, Callaloo and several anthologies.

Her first book of poems, Mass for Shut-Ins, the 117th winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, was released in March 2023 and received the California Book Award. In 2022, Ecco/HarperCollins published her tri-continental memoir, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing, which was People’s Book of the Week and one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Nonfiction Books of the Year.

An alumna of Yale University and the University of Michigan, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University, she served as the inaugural Visiting Writer-in-Residence at Washington University in St. Louis. She held the 2024 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writing at Scripps College. A Cave Canem fellow, she is a mentor in PEN America’s Emerging Voices Fellowship program.