Raised in a rural Arizona town affected by nuclear testing, Allisa Cherry now lives in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches writing workshops for immigrants and refugees. Her collection An Exodus of Sparks (Michigan State University Press, 2025) won the 2024 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize from the RCAH Center for Poetry; the book is built around a crown of sonnets that relocates the story of Moses to the American Southwest. She was a finalist for the Sewanee Review poetry contest and the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in TriQuarterly, Rattle, and The Penn Review.
