About

Tara Mesalik MacMahon is North American Review’s 2024 James Hearst Poetry Prize winner, and an Adroit Journal Gregory Djanikian Scholar Finalist. A Pushcart Prize nominated poet, her first collection of poems, Barefoot Up the Mountain was selected winner of the 2020 Open Country Press Chapbook Contest. 

Tara holds a B.A. from Pomona College and an MBA from Harvard University. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in North American Review, Jabberwock Review, Nimrod International Journal, Poet Lore, Rhino, Radar Poetry, Dogwood a Journal of Poetry and Prose, Mud Season Review, Cold Mountain Review, Empty Bowl Press, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Red Hen Press’s “New Moons” anthology, among other literary journals and anthologies.

Additional honors and prizes include those from Jabberwock Review Editors Prize, Frontier Poetry’s Industry Prize, Ruminate’s Janet McCabe Poetry Prize, River Styx International Poetry Prize, Dogwood’s Poetry Prize, Nimrod’s Francine Ringold Award for New Writers, Comstock Review, and others. 

Tara and her brother Mark Ukra (a HarperCollins author) have co-authored Closet of Dreams, the debut title in their children’s chapter book series, The Adventures of Child and Gamma.

Tara resides on an island in the Salish Sea with her husband Paul and their 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