ELISÁVET MAKRIDIS (she/her), a US-born great-granddaughter of Pontic Greek refugees, is a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominated cross-disciplinary poet and educator. Her poetics aim to calibrate otherwise ways of communing with exiled ancestors across a matrilineage of forced displacement, refugee-hood, genocide, the ever-pend(ulat)ing notion of home, and an endangered mother tongue.
Elisávet holds an MFA from Cornell University where she was an editorial assistant for EPOCH and taught as a lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English for which she was awarded the 2023 Stephen and Margery Russell Distinguished Teaching Award. She also earned her BA from Sarah Lawrence College where she was awarded the Andrea Klein Willison Poetry Prize and Lucy Grealy Prize for Poetry.
A 2026 McCormack (formerly Tin House) Winter Online Workshop Fellow, Elisávet’s work has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, RHINO Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Washington Square Review, Grist, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, amongst others. She is the 2025 winner of Grist‘s ProForma Contest for Hybrid Writing judged by Beth Ann Fennelly, Ruminate Magazine’s 2022 Poetry Prize judged by Rajiv Mohabir and Inverted Syntax’s 2022 Sublingua Prize for Poetry as well as the runner-up for Canthius’s Priscila Uppal Memorial Award for Poetry judged by Liz Howard.
She is a finalist for RHINO’s 2026 Founders’ Prize judged by Matthew Olzmann, Black Warrior Review‘s 2025 Experimental Forms Contest judged by Marwa Helal and 2025 Summer Poetry Contest judged by Aurielle Marie, the 2024-25 Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing Fellowship, ROOM Magazine‘s 2024 Short Forms Contest judged by Zalika Reid-Benta, 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.
Elisávet is currently at work on her debut hybrid poetry collection, which was selected as a finalist for Poetry London’s inaugural Pamphlet Prize judged by Jay Bernard and as a semifinalist for the Fall 2025 Black River Chapbook Competition run by Black Lawrence Press. She is grateful to have received fellowships and support from Cornell University, Vermont Studio Center, Cultivate Project’s La Baldi Residency, the DIS/QUIET International Literary Program, and Seventh Wave’s Narrative Shifts Digital Residency.