Chelsea Daniel is an emerging poet whose work moves between the intimate and the collective, excavating the layered histories of Black and queer American life. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Daniel writes from the intersections of race, gender, disability, and memory, crafting poems that hold both the weight of survival and the shimmer of everyday beauty. Her work explores belonging and longing, Black womanhood, intergenerational healing, and the quiet ways history lives in the body.

Before dedicating herself fully to the arts, Daniel worked within Community Corrections, designing creative writing workshops for women transitioning out of incarceration. This experience deepened her awareness of the rape-to-prison pipeline and shaped her advocacy work with the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center and the Ohio Alliance to End Sexual Violence. There, she led trauma-informed writing workshops that offered survivors a space to transform lived experience into art.

A graduate of Cleveland State University with a BA in English and Creative Writing, Daniel is a 2015 Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA) nonfiction fellow, where she was mentored by Staceyann Chin. Her poetic voice draws from drama, romance, and magical realism, creating work that feels both grounded and otherworldly.

She is currently developing her debut poetry manuscript as a 2025 Breakthrough Writing Resident with Literary Cleveland—a collection that invites readers into the thresholds of memory, resilience, and the quiet revolutions of the soul.