Tara Ballard is from Alaska. Recipient of a Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize, Ballard received an MFA in Creative Writing & the Literary Arts and holds a PhD in English. She is a 2025 fellow at The New School’s Institute for Critical Social Inquiry.
Ballard is an active book reviewer and has published reviews on collections by Ilya Kaminsky and Piotr Florczyk, Iliana Rocha, Leila Chatti, Zeina Hashem Beck, and Maggie Queeney, among others.
Over the years, Ballard has served on the masthead of numerous literary magazines, including Prairie Schooner and Ruminate. She has been an affiliate editor for Alaska Quarterly Review since 2018. Winner of the 2016 Many Voices Project competition, Ballard’s collection House of the Night Watch was published by New Rivers Press. Individual poems and essays have been included in The Atlantic, Bellevue Literary Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Salamander, The Southampton Review, and other literary magazines. Her scholarship can be found in The Journal of American Culture.
Tara Ballard 