Desiree C. Bailey is from Trinidad and Tobago, and Queens, NY. She is the author of What Noise Against the Cane which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. What Noise Against the Cane was also a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize, was longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and was selected as one of the Best Books of 2021 by the New York Public Library. Desiree was the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Clemson University from 2022-2024. She is an Assistant Professor of Poetry in the MFA for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.