Iris Elise L

Iris Elise L is a second-year English major at the University of Maine, where she is president of the creative writing club and has been featured in the undergraduate literary magazine, the Open Field. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio to a northern Kentucky farming family, the cultural and geographic climate at this intersection of the Midwest, the South, and Appalachia has been a recurring theme in her creative and academic work. In 2019 she studied under poet Richie Hofmann during a Kenyon College summer residency program, and she has recently been a recipient of one of the Grenfell Prizes awarded by the University of Maine English Department. When she isn’t at university, she works at Foreverland Farm in Amelia, Ohio, where she has been an animal sanctuary coordinator for two years.