Kelsey Bryan-Zwick (she/they) is a disabled, queer, bilingual immigrant, and author based in Los Angeles, California. Their debut poetry collection, Here Go the Knives (Moon Tide Press 2022)—part memoir, part magical realism, part illustration—focuses on their decades surviving with debilitating scoliosis. Kelsey is The Poetry Lab’s Assistant Director, a Los Angeles Poet Society organizer, Chair of Produced Media for the Stonewall Democratic Club, and a staff writer for Cultural Daily. Kelsey is a UC Santa Cruz alum (go banana slugs!) and they’ve been thrice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and twice for the Best of the Net. On the gram @theexquisitepoet.
They are the authors of four chapbooks, the most recent being Bone Water (Blanket Sea Press) which is a digital and audio collection of fifteen poems on scoliosis. It was one of five chapbooks selected for the Disability Awareness Project in 2021. Kelsey’s poetry can be read in Cultural Daily, Cholla Needles, The Rise Up Review, Spillway, Redshift, Right Hand Pointing, Trailer Park Quarterly, and Writing in a Woman’s Voice. Kelsey is the Alien Buddha House of Horrors Champion for their short story, “Femme Fetal & The Gun.” In addition to poetry Kelsey is a published essayist, interviewer, fiction writer, reviewer, and playwright.
In her role at The Poetry Lab Kelsey leads poetry workshops, helps with marketing, helps guide the team, and takes as many workshops as possible to keep their craft fresh. With the Los Angeles Poet Society Kelsey was a lead organizer and host of the inaugural Queer Writer's Festival hosted at the historic Beyond Baroque. Kelsey is the founder and editor of the micro-press BindYourOwnBooks which creates handmade journals, poetry collections, snail-mail art cards, and small books of poetry. Kelsey has featured in many venues across the Los Angeles area and this year read at the Southern California Poetry Festival.
As an aries-fire-rabbit-scorpio-rising and natural bruja, Kelsey sticks their green thumb where they can. Now in their mid-thirties they are a regular attendee of the cat nap and find siestas full of beauty.
