Nina C. Peláez is a poet, essayist, artist, educator & cultural producer based in Maui, HI.

Often drawing on her experiences as an adoptee and daughter of a Cuban exile, her writing explores themes of displacement, diaspora, ecology, transformation, grief, and resilience. A Best New Poets and Best of the Net nominee, recent work appears or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, The Poetry Foundation, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative, Rattle, Poetry Northwest, Electric Literature, Willow Springs, Waxwing, diode, Pleiades, Swamp Pink, & Verse Daily, among others.

She is currently seeking a home for her first book of poetry: a meditation on grief, silence, estrangement, and the search for belonging within the frameworks of maternal loss, exile, and adoption. Several poems from her manuscript have been published in journals and can be read here.

“Intimate and raw reflections on loss and the body’s haunting memory unfold through poems that speak directly to the reader’s most vulnerable places. These poems explore the body’s terrain, caught between emptiness and possibility—between what we hold and what we surrender…this poet reveals the fragile connections between the self and the world, between absence and desire. Here, past wounds remain tender, yet the speaker traces each scar with care, finding beauty in the hollow spaces they leave behind.”

— January Gill O’Neil, Contest Judge for The Coniston Prize

…

“Gorgeously searing in its sparseness and quietness, painting a crucial picture of memory, family, and dislocation. Otherness haunts these poems, the ancestors are looking on, and the landscape they paint is breathtaking."

—Shortlisted for The DISQUIET Literature Prize

Recently

  • Read it here

  • See the full list of award recipients here.

  • Many thanks to Shō Poetry Journal for this recognition!

  • I am delighted to be a grant recipient from the Barbara Deming Memorial fund to support my debut project, Myth of the Mother.

  • I am so excited to join Tin House in this role!

  • I will be joining the MFA residency in June, leading a master class, and co-teaching workshop.

  • I am so grateful for this support and recognition!

  • My thanks to wildness journal for this recognition!