Photo by Bryan Meltz for the New York Times
Desireé Bewley Dallagiacomo (she/her) is a writer, educator, and organizer.
She is the author of SINK (Button Poetry) and two out-of-print chapbooks. She is a Zell Postgraduate Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, where she earned her MFA in creative writing from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program. She is the co-recipient of the 2025 James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poetry, a winner of the 2026 Academy of American Poets Prize, the Michael R. Gutterman Award in Poetry, and the 2026 second place finisher for the Hopwood Award in Poetry. Her work has received support from Tin House, Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, Academy of American Poets, and The Harpo Foundation, among others.
Desireé received her BA in Feminist Studies and a certificate from the Visualizing Abolition Studies program from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
She is the founder & director of The Heart of It Writing Retreat. She started The Heart of It as a college dropout in 2016, and you can read about why and how here.
She is an enrolled citizen of The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, and she was raised in the foothills of Northern California and the swamplands of Southeast Louisiana. Currently, Desireé is writing about indigeneity, class, surveillance, and the carceral state. Read her current work and subscribe to her free newsletter here.
You can join her weekly writing workshop here.