Gillian Cummings is the author of The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, selected by John Yau as the winner of the 2018 Colorado Prize for Poetry (The Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University, 2018) and My Dim Aviary, winner of the 2015 Hudson Prize (Black Lawrence Press, 2016). She has also written four chapbooks: The Shy Yellow (Dharma Pine Editions, 2023), Ophelia (dancing girl press, 2016), Petals as an Offering in Darkness (Finishing Line Press, 2014), and Spirits of the Humid Cloud (dancing girl press, 2012). Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Boulevard, The Cincinnati Review, The Colorado Review, The Crab Orchard Review, The Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly, The Journal, The Laurel Review, Linebreak, The Massachusetts Review, The New Orleans Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, in other journals and in four anthologies, including The Best of Tupelo Quarterly (Tupelo Press, 2023). In 2008, she was awarded a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund Poetry Prize. A graduate of Stony Brook University (BA, English) and of Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA program, Gillian taught poetry workshops to women at New York Presbyterian Hospital for five years. She is currently sending out her first novel and finishing a subsequent collection of poetry. She also draws botanical still lifes and occasional other subjects. She lives in Catskill, New York, on traditional Schaghticoke lands, with her husband Rich Panish, a composer, and their grey parrot.