Melissa Kwasny is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Where Outside the Body is the Soul Today (Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, University of Washington Press) and the forthcoming The Cloud Path (Milkweed Editions, 2024), as well as a collection of essays Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision. Her first full length nonfiction book, Putting on the Dog: The Animal Origins of What We Wear, explores the cultural, labor, and environmental histories of clothing materials provided by animals. She is also the editor of two anthologies: I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poets in Defense of Global Human Rights and Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950. She was Montana Poet Laureate from 2019-2021, a position she shared with M.L. Smoker.

Widely published in journals, including Willow Springs, Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Orion, Bellingham Review, Kenyon Review, and Boston Review, Kwasny’s poems and essays are also included in the anthologies Queer Nature (Michael Walsh, ed.), Poetics for the More-Than-Human World (Newell, Quetchenbach, and Nolan, eds.); The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Corey and Waldrep, eds.); Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart (Patterson, ed.); Poems Across the Big Sky and New Poets of the American West (Jaeger, ed.), as well as in West of 98: Living and Writing the American West (Rowland and Stegner, eds.). She holds an M.F.A. in Poetry and an M.A. in Literature from the University of Montana.

Kwasny is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America's Cecil Hemley Award and Alice Fay di Castognola Award for a work in progress, an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellowship, the Montana Art Council's Artist's Innovation Award, and residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, Ucross, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and Open AIR/American Prairie.

Kwasny has taught poetry as visiting writer at both the undergraduate and graduate level, including MFA programs at the University of Wyoming, Eastern Washington University/Inland Pacific Center for Writers, and the University of Montana.