COPLEN
Michaela Coplen is an American poet and writer living in London.
In 2013, Michaela was appointed National Student Poet by First Lady Michelle Obama & the President’s Council on the Arts and the Humanities. She has performed her poetry in venues including Carnegie Hall, the Lincoln Center, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and the White House. In 2014, she received a Daily Point of Light award for her work teaching poetry workshops in military communities.
Michaela received a BA in International Studies & Creative Writing from Vassar College, where she was a Ford Scholar, Tananbaum Fellow, and a poetry section editor for the Vassar Review. She won the collegiate Academy of American Poets Prize in 2015, 2016, and 2018, and was a June Seminar fellow at Bucknell University.
In 2018, Michaela was awarded a Marshall Scholarship for graduate study in the United Kingdom. At the University of Oxford, she earned her MPhil in 2020 and her doctorate in 2024.
Michaela’s poetry has been published with The Atlantic, poets.org, Rialto, Adroit, and The London Magazine. She is the winner of the 2019 Troubadour International Poetry Prize and the 2020 York Poetry Prize. Her work is featured in Here: Poems for the Planet and appears in the Best New Poets 2020 anthology. She is a member of the 2023 - 2024 Southbank Centre New Poets Collective.
Her debut poetry pamphlet, Finishing School, is published with ignitionpress.