Raye Hendrix is a writer and photographer from Birmingham, Alabama. Raye’s debut full-length collection of poetry, What Good Is Heaven, is forthcoming from Texas Review Press in 2024 as the Alabama installment of their Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series. Raye is the author of the chapbooks, Every Journal is a Plague Journal (Bottlecap Press) and Fire Sermons (Ghost City Press). The winner of the Keene Prize for Literature (UT Austin) and the Patricia Aakhus Award (Southern Indiana Review), Raye has also been a finalist for the Keene Prize, the Fania Kruger Fellowship in Writing, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal’s Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize, and received honorable mentions for poetry from AWP’s Intro Journals Project and Southern Humanities Review’s Witness Poetry Prize honoring Jake Adam York. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Raye’s creative work has been featured in or is forthcoming from Poetry Daily, American Poetry Review, Poet Lore, 32 Poems, Poetry Northwest, Southern Indiana Review, The Adroit Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. Raye earned their BA and MA from Auburn University and their MFA from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin, where they won the Michael Adams Thesis Prize in Poetry (selected by Robyn Schiff). Raye has worked as the Online Content and Web Editor for Bat City Review and Assistant Managing Editor for Southern Humanities Review. They currently serve as the poetry editor of Press Pause Press and Co-Editor for DIS/CONNECT: A Disability Literature Column (Anomalous Press). Raye is a PhD candidate at the University of Oregon, which has awarded her fellowships and grants for her research at the intersections of American Poetry & Poetics and Disability.