ELISÁVET MAKRIDIS (she/her), a US-born third-generation descendant of Pontic Greek refugees, is a Pushcart Prize- and Best New Poets-nominated hybrid poet and educator. Her poetics aim to calibrate otherwise ways of communing with exiled ancestors across a lineage of forced displacement and genocide to metabolize a wail that predates her body.
An alumna of Sarah Lawrence College, where she received the Andrea Klein Willison Poetry Prize and Lucy Grealy Prize for Poetry, her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Canthius, Reed Magazine, Grist, Tupelo Quarterly, amongst others. Recipient of the 2023 Stephen and Margery Russell Distinguished Teaching Award, Elisávet earned an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University where she taught for four years as a lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English.
In 2022, she was the winner of Ruminate Magazine’s Poetry Prize judged by Rajiv Mohabir and Inverted Syntax’s Sublingua Prize for Poetry, runner-up for Canthius’s Priscila Uppal Memorial Award for Poetry judged by Liz Howard, as well as a finalist for the 20th annual Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest, Indiana Review’s 1/2K Prize for Poetry, the Edwin Markham Prize for Poetry, and Sewanee Review’s 5th annual Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction Contest.
Her debut hybrid manuscript was shortlisted for Poetry London’s 2023 Pamphlet Prize judged by Jay Bernard and was a finalist for the 2024-25 Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing Fellowship. She is grateful to have received residencies and support from the Vermont Studio Center, Cultivate Project’s La Baldi Residency, and the DIS/QUIET International Literary Program. Most recently, she was a semi-finalist for the 2025-26 Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship and shortlisted for ROOM Magazine‘s 2024 Short Forms Contest judged by Zalika Reid-Benta.