COPLEN
Michaela Coplen is a poet and doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford.
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 (with a minor in 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. She completed her MPhil in International Relations at the University of Oxford in 2020, and has continued her studies as a DPhil candidate.
Michaela’s poetry has been published online with The Atlantic and poets.org, as well as in print with the Bellevue Literary Review. She is the winner of the 2019 Troubadour International Poetry Prize and the 2020 York Poetry Prize. Her work is featured in Copper Canyon Press’s eco-poetry anthology, Here: Poems for the Planet, and appears in the Best New Poets 2020 anthology.
Her debut poetry pamphlet, Finishing School, is published with ignitionpress.
Michaela lives in London.