Hello,

Destiny Hemphill (she/her) is a chronically ill ritual worker and poet, living on the unceded territory of the Eno-Occaneechi band of the Saponi Nation (Durham, NC). She is a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow and has received other fellowships for her poetry from Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, Callaloo, Tin House, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers conference, Torch Literary, and elsewhere. She is a co-editor for Poetry as Spellcasting (North Atlantic Books 2023) and the author of the poetry collection motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life (Action Books, 2023), which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series Award, Lambda Literary Award, and Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Prize. Her work has also been featured in Poetry Magazine, Southern Cultures, and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series. She served as an inaugural Poetry Coalition Fellow, a Kenan Visiting Writer in Poetry at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and an inaugural McCormack Writing Center (formerly Tin House) Reading Fellow. Her debut short story “Healer, How Come They Call You Hummingbird?” won Kweli Journal’s inaugural DeLana RA Dameron Prize in Fiction.

⇩