Elise Hempel grew up in suburban Chicago and has worked as an editor, proofreader, copywriter and university English instructor. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry, Measure, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Evansville Review, Southern Poetry Review, and The Midwest Quarterly, as well as on Poetry Daily and in Ted Kooser's weekly column, American Life in Poetry. She is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award and the winner of the 2015 Able Muse Write Prize in Poetry and the 2016 String Poet Prize and has been a finalist or semifinalist for several book awards. Her first chapbook, Only Child, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2014, and in 2016 Able Muse Press published her first full-length collection of poems, Second Rain. She lives in central Illinois.

Other poems by Elise Hempel in Verse Daily:

Books by Elise Hempel:

Other poems on the web by Elise Hempel:
Four poems
"As My Daughter Leaves"
Two poems
"The Transfer"
"Gramps"
"Dirt Roads"
"Mosaic"