Kinsale Drake

Kinsale Drake (she/they) is a Diné poet, playwright, and performer. Her debut poetry collection, The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket (University of Georgia Press, 2024), won the National Poetry Series. A finalist for a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, they have earned fellowships and awards from the Vermont Studio Center, the Aspen Institute, the First Peoples Fund, Bucknell University, Mellon Mays, the Richter Fund at Yale, and others.

Drake earned a BA from Yale University in English and in ethnicity, race, and migration. At Yale, they were awarded the Academy of American Poets's Sean T. Lannan Poetry Prize, the J. Edgar Meeker Award, the Young Native Playwrights Award, and the 2022 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize. She is a former National Student Poet, the nation's highest honor for youth poets, and is the director of NDN Girls Book Club, an organization that supports Indigenous authors and provides free literary programming for Native youth.

Drake is a guest faculty member at the Emerging Diné Writers Institute at Navajo Technical University.