ELISÁVET MAKRIDIS (she/her) is a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominated Pontic Greek poet-educator raised between Astoria, New York and Greece. Her writing and poetics aim to calibrate otherwise ways of grieving for and dreaming with exiled ancestors across a lineage of forced displacement and genocide to invent new ways of metabolizing a wail that predates and exceeds her body.
She is an alumnus of Sarah Lawrence College where she received the Andrea Klein Willison Poetry Prize and Lucy Grealy Prize for Poetry. In 2022, she was the winner of Ruminate Magazine’s Poetry Prize judged by Rajiv Mohabir and Inverted Syntax’s Sublingua Prize for Poetry, runner-up for Canthius’s Priscila Uppal Memorial Award for Poetry judged by Liz Howard, as well as a finalist for the 20th annual Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest, Indiana Review’s 1/2K Prize for Poetry, the Edwin Markham Prize for Poetry, and Sewanee Review’s 5th annual Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction Contest. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Canthius, Reed Magazine, Grist, amongst others. She has received residencies and support from the Vermont Studio Center, Cultivate Project’s La Baldi Residency, and the DISQUIET International Literary Program.
Recipient of the 2023 Stephen and Margery Russell Distinguished Teaching Award, Elisávet holds an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University where she teaches as a Lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English. Her debut book-in-progress was shortlisted for Poetry London’s 2023 Pamphlet Prize judged by Jay Bernard. Most recently, she was a finalist for the 2024-25 Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing Fellowship.