Ariana Benson is a southern Black ecopoet. Their debut collection, Black Pastoral  (University of Georgia Press, 2023) won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Leonard Prize. A Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, Benson has also received the Furious Flower Poetry Prize and the Graybeal Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. Their poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Through her writing, she strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness.