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. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in journals including Narrative, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, Pleiades, Rattle, Swamp Pink, RHINO, Verse Daily, & Willow Springs, 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. Blending lyric, documentary, and mythological modes, the collection moves through personal and collective histories, interweaving elegy with interrogations of motherhood as both inheritance and construct. 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

  • I am delighted to be joining the Adroit Journal as a mentor for their 2025 Summer Mentorship Program, which pairs established writers with high school students interested in learning more about the creative writing processes of drafting, redrafting and editing.

  • My work made it to the shortlist of 1100 entries for the Disquiet Prize. The judges said the work “employed language that was gorgeously searing in its sparesness and queitness, 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."

  • You can read “Self Portrait as Rotting Lemons” and “Metamorphosis” here.

  • Read the poem here

  • Read my interview here.

  • “Last Words Written On a Northwest Passage” appeared in Issue No. 36.

  • Read my poem “Stage Directions for Embrace,” here.

  • Read my exchange with poet and AWP mentor Millicent Borges Accardi here

  • “After the Abortion” appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of Pleiades Magazine.

  • I am so excited to be in residence at Yaddo in Spring 2025.

  • Read the winning group of poems here and what contest judge January Gil O’Neil had to say about my work here.

  • This incredible support will allow me to attend the 2025 workshop.

  • I will be attending the 2024 Autumn Workshop

  • This annual award, administered by the Key West Literary Seminars recognizes emerging poets.

  • Read the poem here.

  • Awarded by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, I was paired with mentor Millicent Borges Accardi.

  • Read the poem here.