Kyla Marshell is a creative writer whose poems, essays, articles and interviews have appeared in Blackbird, BuzzFeed, Calyx, Gawker, The Guardian, O, the Oprah Magazine, the Poetry Foundation, Vinyl Poetry, and elsewhere. She has earned an Academy of American Poets College Prize, as well as Jacob K. Javits and Cave Canem fellowships. In 2013, Ebony.com named her one of "7 Young Black Writers You Should Know."
At MacDowell, Kyla made progress on her first book, A Seed Is A Star, a memoir about a chance encounter with a distant relative that leads her to seek out other members of her extended family. At MacDowell in 2020, she edited the second draft of A Seed Is A Star.
She is a graduate of Spelman College with a B.A. in English, and Sarah Lawrence College with an M.F.A. in creative writing. Originally from Boston, she grew up in Silver Spring, MD, Morehead, KY, and Portland, ME, and now lives in New York.
Portrait by Marcus K. Bird
