Kai Carlson-Wee is the author of Rail (BOA Editions). His work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Tin House, The American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest, TriQuarterly, and The Missouri Review, which selected a group of his poems for the 2013 Jeffery E. Smith Editor’s Prize. He is also the winner of a Pushcart Prize and the Lynda Hull Memorial Prize from Crazyhorse.
Carlson-Wee’s awards include those from the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fund, among others. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He currently lives in San Francisco and is a lecturer at Stanford University.
While at MacDowell in 2015, he worked on his first book of poems, Rail. During his 2025 residency, he worked on a collection of poems addressing mental health issues and the ways in which they are reflected in poetic forms, ecological distress, and the myths of the American West.
