About

Tara Mesalik MacMahon is North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize winner, selected by Diane Seuss, and a winner of ONLY POEMS Poet of the Year Award. Her debut full-length collection, “To the Gods of Perfect Sugar,” was finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award, the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and the Catamaran Poetry Prize. Her chapbook of poems, “Barefoot Up the Mountain” won theOpen Country Press Chapbook Prize.  

Tara’s poems also appear in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod International, Poet Lore, Red Hen Press’s “New Moons,” Empty Bowl Press’s “I Sing the Salmon Home,” winner of the Washington State Book Award, among other literary journals and anthologies.

Additional honors and prizes include those from Nimrod International, Jabberwock Review and Pushcart nomination, Frontier Poetry, Beloit Poetry, Floating Bridge Presss, Orison Books, the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, Comstock Review, and the Charles Simic Memorial Prize.

Tara and her brother Mark Ukra, a Harper Collins author, co-authored, Closet of Dreams, a children’s chapter book, Amazon #1 bestseller, and Gold Medal Winner of the MoonBeam Children’s Book Award. 

A graduate of Pomona College and Harvard Business School, Tara serves as ONLY POEMS Director of Outreach. She resides on an island in the Salish Sea with her husband and their rescue dog.

You choose to be a novelist, but you're chosen to be a poet. This is a gift and it is a tremendous responsibility. You have to be willing to give something terribly intimate & secret of yourself  to the world and not care, because you have to believe that what you have to say is important enough.  —May Sarton