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

Her work across genres examines both landscape and the body as interwoven sites of institutional and ecological power, engaging both the lyric and documentary to explore grief, inheritance, and care. A Best New Poets and Best of the Net nominee, recent poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in The Atlantic, The Poetry Foundation, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, Narrative, Willow Springs, Rattle, The Adroit Journal, Waxwing, diode, The Offing, Electric Literature, Swamp Pink, & Verse Daily among others.

Her debut chapbook In the House of Men was the winner of the 2026 Snowbound Chapbook Prize and is forthcoming with Tupelo Press. She is also the editor and co-author of W.S. Merwin’s Palm Forest, about the poet W.S. Merwin’s ecological and literary legacy, and which will be published with Timber Press in Fall 2027.

You can read some of her recently published poetry and essays here.

"Striking and incantatory, the poems of In the House of Men explore the architectures and attitudes of devotion, where the world is always at its most sensuous. 'All day, the bells, they ring and ring,' the poet writes, 'But the buried women have no ears.' Desire rattles in the chambers of these poems, drawn from myth and history, from autobiography and imagination, refining images and insights. What erudite and exuberant work!"

—Richie Hofmann, Contest Judge for The Snowbound Chapbook Prize

“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

“Drawing on sources as diverse as birth records and natural history, yet retaining the intimacy of personal grief, she has shaped a story of loss on many levels. The poems are visually stunning and hauntingly drew me back for another read, and another. We need this book.”

—Judge’s Citation, The Shirley Holden Helberg Grant

“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