Divya Victor

Divya Victor (b. 1983) is a Tamil-American poet, essayist, and educator. She is the author of CURB (Nightboat Books), which won the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award and the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. It was also a finalist for the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award (Poetry). 

Her next book, KIN, a collection of essays, is due out from Graywolf in 2027. She is the recipient of a 2025 Creative Capital Award for this work.

Divya is also the author of KITH (Fence Books/ Book*hug); Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays (Merve Verlag, trans. Lena Schmidt), NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), and THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues). Her work has been collected in numerous venues, including The Atlantic, The New York Times, BOMB, the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, POETRY, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, W.W. Norton’s The Seagull Reader, and boundary2.

She was a 2023 PEN Affiliated Fellow at Civitella Ranieri and a collaborator on an Andrew Mellon Just Futures grant. She has been a Mark Diamond Research Fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Riverrun Fellow at the Archive for New Poetry at University of California San Diego, and a Writer in Residence at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition (L.A.C.E.), Banff Center for Creativity, University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Program, among several other institutional residencies.  Her work has been performed or installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Los Angeles, National Gallery Singapore, the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition (L.A.C.E.), and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). 

She has been an editor at Jacket2 (United States) and for Ethos Books (Singapore), Invisible Publishing (Canada), and Book*hug Press (Canada). Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Polish, and Czech.

She is a Professor of English and Writing at Michigan State University, where she was the recipient of the institution’s Teacher-Scholar Award (2023), a College of Arts & Letters Faculty Leadership Award (2025) and the University’s exclusive nominee for the Michigan Association of State Universities Distinguished Professor of the Year Award in both 2024 and 2025. Here, she is the Director of the Creative Writing Program.

She is represented by Chris Clemans at Janklow & Nesbit Associates.