Desiree C. Bailey is the author of What Noise Against the Cane (Yale University Press, 2021), winner of the 2020 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. She is also the author of the fiction chapbook In Dirt or Saltwater (O’clock Press, 2016) and has short stories and poems published in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, the Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Desiree has received awards from the New York State Council on the Arts / New York Foundation for the Arts and Poets & Writers. Desiree is from Trinidad and Tobago, and Queens, New York. She lives in Providence, RI.