Ari Banias

Ari Banias was born in Los Angeles and grew up in the Chicago area. He now lives in the Bay Area and teaches in the MFA programs at the University of San Francisco and Antioch University. He has been the Guest Editor for poetry.org’s Poem-A-Day series. As an MFA student at Hunter College, Banias was the recipient of the Friedman Scholarship, and worked with the celebrated poet Mark Doty.

Banias is the author of A Symmetry, winner of the 2022 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans & Gender Variant Literature, and Anybody, a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Center USA Literary Award. His work has been supported by Headlands Center for the Arts, MacDowell, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner Fellowship program.