About

Tara Mesalik MacMahon is North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize winner and ONLY POEMS Poet of the Year Prize finalist. Her debut full-length collection, To the Gods of Perfect Sugar was finalist for the 2025 St. Lawrence Book Award, the 2025 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and the 2025 Catamaran Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Barefoot Up the Mountain, was winner of the Open Country Press Chapbook Contest. 

Tara holds a B.A. from Pomona College and an M.B.A. from Harvard University. Her poems also appear or are forthcoming in Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod International Journal, Duende, Red Hen Press’s “New Moons” anthology, among other literary journals and anthologies.

Additional honors and prizes include those from Nimrod’s Francine Ringold Award for New Writers, Frontier’s Industry Prize, Beloit Poetry, Comstock Review, Floating Bridge Press, Orison Books, among others. 

Tara and her brother Mark Ukra (a HarperCollins author) have co-authored best-selling Closet of Dreams, gold medal winner of Mooonbeam’s 2024 Children’s Book Award.

She resides on an island in the Salish Sea with her husband Paul and rescue dog Hector.

"You choose to be a novelist, but you're chosen to be a poet. This is a gift and it's a tremendous responsibility. You have to be willing to give something terribly intimate and 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